Note:  It was my privilege to be asked to speak—and to host one year—from 2015 to 2019 at the annual Labor Day Event on Woodstock Square sponsored by McHenry County Progressives.  Today we will look back at the meat of my talk in 2016—a Presidential election year that turned out to have disastrous results.  Specifics about that race are now dated, but the themes they represent are all back this year, as you can read.  My remarks on the working class virtue of solidarity were adapted from earlier material, including one of my Labor Day sermons at the old Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock.

We gathered here last year [2015] for the first time, a small band of folks called together by some local fans of Bernie Sanders who wanted to celebrate his hero Eugene V. Debs and his connection to Woodstock.  As a fan of both, an old Wobbly, and a soapboxer, I was thrilled to be asked to participate.

A lot has happened in the last year and here we are again.  Bernie Sanders, thanks to folks like those who organized the Labor Day event, went from being an obscure longshot, to the leader of a wide and deep political revolution, and came tantalizingly close to winning the Democratic Party nomination.  When he didn’t some folks were heartbroken, other mad.  Some picked up their toys and went home in a sulk and huff.  Some picked up Bernie’s challenge to keep the Revolution going by going deep and wide—running for local office and trying to recapture Congress from troglodyte Republicans.  That’s what the folks here in McHenry County have done.

Some folks swore that no matter what they would never vote for Hillary Clinton, who apparently has horns and is the spawn of Satan, no matter what, no way, no how.  Others have either swallowed hard and followed Bernie’s appeal and decided to vote for Hillary, or with more enthusiasm vowed to actively work for her election along with the rest of the Democratic ticket.

People who were comrades in the campaign struggle a couple of months ago but are on opposite sides of the Hillary divide, are hurling invectives at one another, denouncing each other as traitors or saboteurs.  Relationships have been shattered.  That longed for political revolution is crippled by dissention.

Meanwhile genuine naked fascism has arisen as a mass movement and swallowed the traditional conservative party.  Ordinary Americans who have seen their lives and futures sacrificed time and again to corporate greed have been taught to blame their woes on a rotating cast of others—Mexicans and emigrants this week, Muslims and refugees next, women, gays, Black lives Matter protesters, scientists, the sick and the elderly.  Violence is in the air like the whiff of gunpowder.

Considering all this, on this Labor Day I want to commend to you the working class virtue of solidarity even if you have never considered yourself a worker. 

First we need to consider what solidarity is not….

Solidarity is not sympathy.  Sympathy is a passive emotion.  It also implies a separation from the object of sympathy and can teeter on pity, which is just sympathy tinged with revulsion. Empathy might be closer to the meaning in that it implies a common understanding of the distress.  But empathy is also passive.  Solidarity demands action.

Solidarity is not charity.  Charity implies a power and privilege differential.  The more powerful and more privileged deign to give to the less fortunate who are expected to respond with appropriate gratitude and humility.  Solidarity is mutual aid among equals.

Solidarity is not altruism.  Altruism is supposedly selfless giving requiring sacrifice but expecting no reward—except perhaps praise for being saint-like.  Solidarity recognizes the commonality of our conditions and expects to receive support by right as well as give it.

Solidarity is not family.  Families—and by extension surrogate families like clans, nations, religions, races and others—are expected to support their members out of blood obligation.  Solidarity demands respect for commonality with the other.  Solidarity with the stranger dismantles walls and promotes peace instead of a mad scramble over scarce resources.

Solidarity is not utopian.  Utopians conjure up sweet dreams of the perfect.  Utopians may simply drift on in the opium cloud of that dream. More dangerously, some utopians construct rigid ideologies around their vision which eventually require the ruthless suppression of anything and anyone not in conformity to that ideology.  Solidarity is rooted in the common realities we face together and is interested in addressing the roots of the problems as well as ameliorating the immediate effects.

Solidarity is not all warm and fuzzy.  Warm and fuzzy denies oppression.  Solidarity recognizes that there are those whose own narrow self-interest causes them to exploit, subjugate, and abuse others.  And solidarity demands common action to defend against such depredations and—yes—boldly to ultimately defeat the oppressors.

Solidarity is a recognition of our place in humanity, an ethic, and an active response to our common interests.

Solidarity enlarges our communities, builds bridges of respect that can span differences.  It does not demand lock-step conformity to some ideological purity to act together in mutual support.  It requires listening, really listening and not just waiting our turn to deliver a lecture.  When generations of feminists support Hillary Clinton passionately it means not sneering that they are voting their vaginas, but understanding why and ultimately standing with them just as we hope that they will stand with us for the dismantlement of corporate power. 

Solidarity requires humility and taking the risk of having our fragile identities challenged.  We cannot give more than lip service to Black Lives Matter unless we understand and take ownership of the White privilege understanding it is not a moral flaw but a condition we are born to.  By breaking down our defenses we can collaborate in our mutual liberation with respect and understanding.

Most of all, solidarity requires commitment and action.  There are no sidelines, no room for mere cheerleaders.  Each and every one of us are called to put our bodies and our lives on the line again and again in some meaningful ways.  And we are buoyed by the knowledge that others are prepared to do the same for us.

Can we make a promise this Labor Day to commit to the working class virtue of solidarity?  Can we face the challenges not just of the coming elections, but in defending women’s bodies and choice, dismantlement the new slavery of mass incarceration, and standing in the Spirit Camp of the Standing Rock Sioux as they defend all of our water.  There is a lot to do.  No individual can do it all. But we can all do something.

In the words of Ralph Chaplin in the great anthem of the Working Class:

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold;

Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.

We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old,

For the Union makes us strong!

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040855/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-09-05_Right_Livelihood.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040833/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/9-05-21-audio.mp3

"In Our Hands Is Placed a Power" (September 5, 2021) Worship Service

Welcome to our annual Labor Day service, where we celebrate the contributions to social justice by the labor movement both currently and historically. As has been true for several years now, we will be joined by members of San Francisco's labor union choir Rockin' Solidarity. Hard times have always been here for the vast majority of the world's population, but now all of us are at critical crossroads, and which roads we take over the next decade or two may determine the very survival of humanity. As we make these life-or-death choices, what can we learn from both the victories and defeats of organized labor?

Rev. Millie Phillips, Guest Minister; Wonder Dave, Worship Associate; The Rockin’ Solidarity Labor Chorus, Pat Wynne, Director; Mark Sumner, songleader; Bill Ganz, pianist

Eric Shackelford, camera; Shulee Ong, camera; Jonathan Silk, OOS Design & sound; Joe Chapot, live chat moderator; Carrie Steere-Salazar, flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040811/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210905MPSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040728/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210905.mp3

Tomorrow is officially Labor Day in the United States, a Federal Holidaycelebrated on the first Monday of September since 1894.  For most people it is just the last hurrah of summer, an occasion for one last cookout and the gateway to fall and football season.  In most cities and towns, the labor movement is not even perfunctorily acknowledged.  The press uses the occasion to annually either write the obituary of unions or to denounce them as powerful and greedy bullies, depending on the political inclination of the outlet.

While most of us working schlumps are grateful for the day off (if we get one), I for one, wish I could officially celebrate Labor Day with virtually the whole rest of the world on May 1.  International Labor Day was proclaimed by the Second International in honor of the memory of Chicago’s Haymarket Martyrs at the suggestion of none other than American Federation of Labor (AFL) chief Samuel Gompers himself and which quickly spread around the world.  American unions celebrated it too.

But within just a few years Gompers was at the heart of a deal that substituted the September observance for May Day, a few crumbs from the Boss’s table, and a pat on the head by the Civic Federation in exchange for a promise to oppose labor radicalism and the growth of industrial style unionism in rapidly expanding basic heavy and the extractive industries—mining, forestry, agriculture, etc.

It is true that a September Labor Day observance pre-dated the 1886 Haymarket Affair.  In 1882 the New York Central Labor Union, made up of skilled craft unions belonging to a prototype of the AFL and lodgesof the rival Knights of Laborcooperated in a call for a giant parade followed by picnics, games and amusements, and educational talks.  It was designed to showcase the prideand power of the labor movement and also to press for the chief demand of labor reformers—the Eight Hour Day—the same causethat would be marked by an attempted nationwide General Strike on May 1, 1886, an event that led up the attackby police on a worker’s rally in Chicago’s Haymarket on May 4 and the bomb blast blamed on the mostly German and anarchist leaders of the local labor movement.

New York City officials, eager to appeaseworkers after a number of local strikes were suppressed with violence, gave their official approval to the parade.  On September 5, 1882 an estimated 30,000 workers marched in military order behind elaborate banners representing local unions of all of the trades, job shops, and Knights of Labor lodges.  It was an impressive display, but despite later claims by the AFL that observance of Labor Day spread quickly, only a few other cities, mostly in New York, began holding September celebrations. 

In the meantime, huge May Day parades and rallies spread across the country.  But the late 1880s and early 1890s were the beginning of a nearly 40 year period of virtual open class warfare with worker’s strikes being violently suppressed by local, state, and federal authoritiesand armies of private goonsand strikebreakers.  And workers often fought back with equal violence.  Episodes like the Homestead Steel Strike with its running gun battles between Pinkertons and workers, the nationwide Pullman Strike of 1882, and virtually continuous battles in the coal fields and hard rock mines nationwide, made many fear for revolution or civil war.

Democratic President Grover Cleveland, who ordered out the Army to crush the Pullman Strike, wanted a symbolic peace offering to Labor without actually granting the movement any of its demands. 

Republican king pin Ohio Senator Marc Hanna, soon to anoint William McKinley as the next President, was even more ambitious—he proposed a pact of cooperation between capital and “responsible labor.”  He offered Gompers, the Cigar Roller’s Union chief who headed the AFL, a seat in his new Civic Federationalongside the robber barons and captains of industry.  Hanna did not make the same offer to Grand Master Workman Terrance V. Powderlyof the Knights of Labor, who personally opposed strikes and advocated arbitration of disputes, because the members of Knights lodges included unskilled workers clamoring for recognition in heavy industry.  Gompers AFL would be allowed to pursue organizing skilled workers strictly by trade but not organize the great mass of unskilled, largely immigrantworkers.  Gompers would also be called on to use his unions to oppose labor radicalism, and even to break strikes led by unions outside the grand agreement.

With Gompers in his pocket, Hanna engineered enough Republican support in Congress to get Cleveland’s official Labor Day proposal passed.  Cleveland signed it in to law just six days after Eugene V. Debs’s industrial union of railroad workers was smashed in the end of the Pullman Strike. 

Within a few years all states either aligned their existing Labor celebrations with the Federal holiday or enacted state proclamations echoing the U.S. call. 

Meanwhile authorities everywhere tried to suppress May Day observances, which continued to be supported by militant unionists and radicals of every sort—social democrats, anarchists, and Marxists.  The Knights of Labor withered away, but aggressive industrial unions, especially in the mining industry, continued to fight both the bosses and the AFL’s attempt to divide the aristocracy oflabor from the mass rank and file.  In little more than a decade the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) would be formed to intensify that battle.

During the Depression and the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrats became the party of labor.   Labor Day became the official kick-offof Democratic election campaigns. Labor Day parades and rallies often seemed more of a platform to launch candidacies than a labor union celebration.

Even that has faded as the percentage of Americans in unions continued to shrink year after year after a high tide in the early ‘60’s.  By the Clinton era, Democrats continued to get support from labor, but seemed to try to disassociatethemselves from it, shunning identification as the party for of labor in favor of being seen as the champion of the Middle Class.

As half-assed a holiday as Labor Day is, I hope we all will take a moment to thank the American Labor movement for largely creating that Middle Class.

In 1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus went toe to toe in what Eisenhower feared could be the nation’s second Fort Sumner moment—a spark that could ignite a second Civil War.  All the ingredients were there including long building and bitter Southern resentment of Federal meddling in the cherished traditions of segregationand White supremacy,a defiant governor and inflamed White population, equally intransigent neighboring states that might leap at the opportunity to join a rebellion, and both executives had armed military forces under their command.

Under the circumstances it was understandable that the Republican President had significant qualms about taking confrontational action.  But the old general was deeply steeped in ideas of Constitutional responsibility, a chain of command, and adherence to the rule of law.  He might not have been wildly supportive of the Brown v. Board of Education decision that mandated and end to “separate but equal” public schools.  He might even have had qualms about its sweeping reach and effect on civil tranquility—Ike was never entirely clear on the depth of his personal commitment to Civil Rights.  But he was absolutely clear on the rule of law and considered it his sworn duty at President to uphold established law no matter the hazard. 

Faubus bet everything on the chance that a man born in Texas to a Virginia bred mother would not act against White people.  He would regret that gamble.

On September 4, 1957 Faubus mobilized the state National Guard to block 9Black students from beginning classes at Little Rock Central High School.  The nine students, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Minnijean Brown, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo, were all legally registered at the school after the local Board of Education had voted unanimously to follow the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and desegregate the school.

The local chapter of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) had carefully recruited the students, picking only outstanding students with excellent attendance records and “respectable” families. The Mothers’ League of Central High, a thinly disguised front for the White Capital Citizen’s Council, had appealed to Faubus in August to block the Board’s decision to integrate the school.  The Governor supported the group’s appeal for an emergency injunction to block integration to “prevent violence.”  Federal Judge Ronald Davies denied the request and ordered that school open with the students.

Faubus went on television on September 2, the eve of the scheduled opening of classes, to announce his call upof the Guard, again supposedly to prevent violence.  The School Board asked the nine students not to attend the first day of school, but Judge Davis ordered the Board to proceed on September 4.

Guardsmen circled the building, and a mob of hundreds of white protestors clogged the surrounding area.  Guardsmen turned back one group of students.  Fifteen year old Elizabeth Eckford, approaching alone toward a different entrance was also turned away.  As she turned to walk to a bus stop, she was surrounded by the mob.  “They moved closer and closer,” she later recalled, “...Somebody started yelling ... I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd—someone who maybe could help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me.”  She finally made her way to the bus stop and escaped, but her ordeal was captured by national television cameras and still photographers.

The Board again appealed to Judge Davies for a relief injunction.  He again refused and directed U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. to file a petition for an injunction against Faubus and officers of the Arkansas National Guard to prevent them from obstructing his court order to desegregate the school.

 As legal maneuvering continued, tension in the city mounted. On September 9 the Black students did get some supportfrom the Council of Church Women who asked the Governor to remove the troops and allow desegregation to proceed.  They announced a city-wide prayer service for September 12.  Members of the council were threatened with violence. 

Meanwhile Democratic Congressman Brook Hays arranged a meeting between the Governor and President Dwight D. Eisenhowerat his vacation home in Newport, Rhode Island.  Faubus refused to back down.

On September 20 Judge Davies issued a direct order to cease interfering with the enrolment of the Black students.  Faubus recalled the Guard and left the state for a Southern Governor’s Conferencewhere he hoped to rally support.

On Monday, September 23 Little Rock Police were left to contend with a snarling mob of over 1000 people. The Black students slipped into the building by a side entrance while the crowd was distracted bybeating four black reporters covering developments.  When the mob discovered that they were inside they threatened to storm the school.  Once again the nine students were sent home for “their own safety” with police protection.

Eisenhower had enough.  When Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Mann appealed for Federal support for his overwhelmed police, the President was ready to act.  He nationalized the Arkansas National Guard to take it out from under the command of the Governor although he was not entirely sure that senior Guard officers would obey the order or that the Guard troops might not mutiny and declare allegiance to their state. 

In a move unprecedented since Reconstruction, Eisenhower ordered the elite 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. 

His decision to use those troops was highly significant.  The 101st was based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky but several other units were nearer.  The bloated Army was near it peak of peace time manpower with the height of the Cold War and near universal service via the draft.  But only a handful of elite divisions were fully combat ready and more important highly disciplined under the most trusted officers.  And most of those were deployed with NATO in Germany or in Korea.  Other units were what might be called the Beetle Bailey Army, barely trained beyond basic and mired in the boredom of camp life.  They were viewed as an on-duty reserve that could be mobilized and trained in the event of a war crisis.  Some of those units might have been regarded as lax if deployed.  No one would think that of the Screaming Eagles.

The next day, September 27, troops took up positions and escorted the students into the building.

Federal troops continued to escort the students daily for a week.  The majority of the troops were withdrawn and duty transferred to the Guard under close supervision of Regular Army officers on October 1.  Students first attended school incivilian rather than military vehicles on October 25 and all Federal troops were finally withdrawn in November.

The students were enrolled, but their ordeal was far from over.  All were harassedand threatened by white students in the school.  Melba Petillo had acid thrown in her eyes. Minnijean Brown was assaulted several timesand eventually suspended and expelled for dropping a bowl of chili on an assailant in the lunchroom.  All students were completely ostracized by their white classmates.  School authorities eventually also suspended more than 100 white students and expelled four.

Despite the distraction, at the end of the school year Ernest Green became the first Black student tograduate from Central High.

But it was not over.  Faubus closed not only Central High but all four Little Rock high schools for the 1958-’59 term.  When courts ordered them re-opened in September of 1959 only two of the original Little Rock 9, Carlotta Walls and Jefferson Thomas, came back.  They both graduated in 1961.

Other Southern Governors, notably Alabama’s George Wallace would continue defy Federal school desegregation orders, but the knowledge that the government was willing to call out the Army to enforce the desegregation undoubtedly prevented much future violence.

The confrontation between Eisenhower and Faubus was portrayed in the 2012 film Lee Daniels’ The Butlerwith Robin Williams as Ike.  Faubus was never seen.

Multiplatform – Outdoors and Livestreamed on Youtube, 9:30 am

We had expectations for what Fall 2021 was going to be like … and those plans have changed. As we move into another year where covid shapes much of what we do (and don’t do), perhaps we ... read more.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040707/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuH6NrcyGes&feature=youtu.be

Multiplatform – Outdoors and Livestreamed on Youtube, 9:30 am

Join us either in person, outdoors at Live Oak, or on our Youtube channel for our annual Homecoming/Water Communion service.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040623/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWa6jyUDy4A&feature=youtu.be

How is your anger showing up? Are you more irritable, or carrying a slow-simmering rage? There are many justifiable reasons to be mad right now. How do we best channel that anger in a way that is productive and doesn’t harm us or the people ... read more.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040541/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj4YukhliOc&feature=youtu.be

The last 5 years, and especially the last 8 months have given us ample reason to question some things we took for granted. We may be feeling disillusioned with humanity and with life itself. What do we do with those feelings?

This service will be streamed ... read more.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040458/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1eObhy2msE&feature=youtu.be

September 2021

The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. –Maya Angelou

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Download this entire Quest Monthly issue as a PDF

Last semester, in a class on global Christianity at Meadville Lombard, I was reading examples of the early Christians in the Roman Empire taking a stand and becoming martyrs. I was inspired by their resilience and sacrifice as they were being persecuted for their conversion to a new faith. Those who became martyrs could have possibly saved themselves by denying who they were and who they served but decided that it was better to die in faith and in truth than to live in denial and a lie. They were followers of Jesus Christ and followed his example of faith and commitment unto death— his Crucifixion—for they believed that the ultimate sacrifice would yield the ultimate reward—for them, it was everlasting life.

The early Christian martyrs’ sacrifice of their lives made me reflect and think: For what cause would I be willing to risk my life? For what cause would I give up my security, my comfort, my safety? For what are we called to martyrdom now, in this time, and in this place? In my practice, I call upon my ancestors for guidance.

When I do, the spiritual Wade in the Water comes to my mind almost instantly. “Wade in the Water, God’s Gonna Trouble the Water.” But then the Civil Rights Movement comes to mind, and the risks it took to bring about change that was felt globally. By the later years of the Civil Rights Movement, activists began to realize that water had already been troubled. It was no longer about, “God’s Gonna Trouble the Waters,” but that the waters were already troubled, as activists through the years had been rocking the boat of white supremacy and racism through their own successes, through boycotts, through protests, through massive voter registrations, through sit-ins, and through marches, and we saw backlash of against all of them by segregationists and racists, peoples and institutions that did not want to see them succeed.

PHOTO BY JASON LEUNG ON UNSPLASH

As a professor of African American history, I remember lecturing about the Freedom Singers leading those gathered in Black churches, mostly in Alabama and Georgia, with rousing songs to lift up their spirits and get them ready for what they were about to face. These resistance fighters staged many peaceful, nonviolent protests met with fury, violence, and incarceration—like the early Chris tian martyrs. Their songs went from “Wade in the Water” to “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” to “This May Be the Last Time.” It was the last time for some of them, but the looming threat made them prepare for the inevitable. They may have to give up their lives like the early Christian martyrs.

What about now? In this time and in this place? What kind of lives are we living, bowing down to fear and oppression? For what cause would YOU willingly risk your life? For what cause would you give up your security, your comfort, your safety? For what are we called to martyrdom now, in this time, and in this place?

Where in your life have you felt most at home?

We posed the above question in the most recent issue of the Worthy Now newsletter (a biannual newsletter sent to all incarcerated CLF members), and received the responses on the next two pages in response. Thank you all for offering us this window into yourselves and the experiences of your lives through your reflections — we are so grateful.

ROBERT

CLF Member, incarcerated in MA

Home. A small word with big meanings.  They say that, “home is where the heart is,” and I couldn’t agree more. It’s been nine years since I’ve been home, and I feel every day that yearning to return.

Growing up, I never thought I’d have a home to call my own. I had loving parents who provided for me, so there was always a place I could call home, but the fullest meaning of home never fully resonated within me. Since I have autism, I thought that I’d never find someone to love, who could love me. I thought I’d never have kids, be a father, a teacher, a protector.

Then I found her, and it all clicked. It just made sense, felt right, all the way to my core. We had a little one, we got our own place, and another little one was on the way. All was right in the world.

Until it wasn’t. I was torn away from my home. I fought to have the opportunity to go back, but was denied. Separated from them, I was emotionally torn to shreds. The pain is still so great. Now, they are still torn apart, neither of our kids under her care, or even cared for by the same person. Our family of four now lives in four different places.

So I end with this: home is a precious thing. It’s delicate, fragile, nearly ethereal. It is perfect in its imperfections. Never take it for granted, for you never know when your world will be upended, and it will be gone.

KEVIN

CLF member, incarcerated in VA

I feel most at home where I both give and receive respect from those around me. Respect leads to a great deal of appreciation in which accountability is held. This appreciation and accountability from respect can and should lead to honor and loyalty, which combined, should lead to trust. Trust leads to love. With love comes a place that we feel comfortable and safe — an environment we can call home.

This can be anywhere as long as we hold all these things together. We must have courage to make that first step, and hope and faith that it will all lead to a place one can call home — not necessarily a house or a building, but a place of real peace, a sanctuary called home.

In my life, I find this sanctuary with my girlfriend of 37 years, along with my son, mom, sister, and those who have the qualities I’ve described above.

EDWARD

CLF Member, incarcerated in OH

PHOTO BY FLICKR USER ANTHONY VIA FLICKR

This is an easy one to tell. Every year I would make the journey down I-75 to a town called Middlesboro, Kentucky. My travel was always around the fourth of July. It is a tri-state town with neighbors called Tennessee and Virginia. There is a spot that I would go to that is located at the top of a small mountain. The spot is called “the Pinnacle.” It is located about 2,200 or 2,400 feet up the mountain. To get there you drive up a winding road with hairpin turns. Once there, you walk a path that is maybe a hundred yards to my favorite spot, the pinnacle. It is a man-made ledge that stretches about ten feet over the edge of the mountain. Up there you can see all three states. On a very clear day you can even see North Carolina from there. An airport sits off to the right. A man-made lake is in the middle. To the right is the town of Cumberland Gap, Tennessee.

While there, I feel Gaia’s strength flowing through the spot. The view is spectacular. It is a calm and peaceful place where you can talk to God or the Goddess and God, whatever your preference. There is where I feel at home.

TALON

CLF Member, incarcerated in CA

​​Home is such a strong word. For most of my life, I have never really felt at home anywhere. From living with my family, to foster housing, to juvenile hall, to prison, home has been seemingly unattainable for me.

The closest concept of home that I have is when I was 13, in a court-appointed group home for a bad decision I chose to make. It was the first time that I felt truly safe. There was no more violence, abuse, and expectations to be someone that I never really was. I was happy.

My current incarceration is due to another bad string of choices I made. I have spent the last eight years working on myself to create a new me dedicated to helping others and living a productive life. During this process of self-improvement, I have learned that happiness comes from within.

So, I realized that as long as I am happy, home is where you make it. Home is within oneself, and family is who we choose. Despite my incarceration, I am at home, and the CLF is my family.

ERIC

CLF member, incarcerated in TX

PHOTO BY DAVID GAVI ON UNSPLASH

For me, home was never really a place. It has always been more about the people I’ve surrounded myself with. I’ve never had a place to call home, but I’ve felt at home with people who loved me, and in nature, with the full cycle of life. We come from earth, are placed in the bosom of earth, to be reborn again.

I think there is no better place to call home as the place where life begins: in the wild, like our ancestors once had. Not in a building, but a place you can go to rest. One day I’ll have that again.

Some prefer a house or apartment, but for me, home is outside where the wild things roam.

Hello beloveds,

I’m Rev. Aisha Ansano, and I am thrilled to be serving as the new Chair of the Board of The Church of the Larger Fellowship!

You may recognize my name from the last few years. I just completed my first 3-year term on the Board, and I’ve served as the Board liaison to the Nominating Committee during this time. I was also a member of the search team that called our amazing lead ministry team, which was a complete joy.

When I joined the CLF Board 3 years ago, I didn’t know much about the CLF besides a general familiarity. When I got the email from the Nominating Committee, I wasn’t sure if I would say yes—but during the conversation, I got excited for the work that the CLF was doing, and the potential work that could be done. And so I said yes, decided to make a commitment to this congregation, to give my time, energy, and resources to help make it thrive. And I said yes again to serving on the Nominating Committee, because I knew firsthand just how much the conversations had by the nominating committee have a huge impact.

And when the Board was putting together a search team for the new lead ministry of the CLF, even though the task felt daunting, I said yes, again. I said yes because I was excited to be part of the visioning for the next phase of the CLF. I said yes because even though I knew it would be a lot of hard work, I wanted to be part of the conversation to help shape the next chapter of the CLF.

I have not said yes because I think I’m the perfect person for any of these jobs. I’ve said yes because the CLF is important to me, and important to Unitarian Universalism. Even when I’m nervous about taking on a new role, or not sure what to expect, I say yes to service to the CLF over and over again, because the CLF gives me hope for our faith and how it can live into our dreams of what it can be.

A little bit about me: I’m an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister living in Malden, MA, a city north of Boston. I am the affiliated community minister at First Parish in Malden, which means that, while I am not on staff, I serve and support the congregation in other ways. My dream is to plant a dinner church, to create a community where people gather together around the table for worship and a meal, where all are welcomed exactly as they are. The pandemic has put those plans on hold for the moment, but I’ve been lucky to create Nourish UU Dinner Church Consultants with my friend and colleague Rev. Emily Conger. Through Nourish, we help Unitarian Universalist communities create communal, embodied worship experiences through the model of dinner church.

I’m excited to continue to serve the CLF in my new role as Board Chair, and can’t wait to experience what comes next for the CLF,  together.

Yours in faith,
Rev. Aisha

On August 31, 1920 Station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan broadcastthe first news report Americans ever heard on that newfangled doohickey, radio.  The station had just gone on the air for the first time less than two weeks earlier, on August 20.  The Detroit News owned the infant operation but seemed either a little ashamed of it or unsure if they had just thrown good money into a mere fad.

In fact, the station was issued an amateur license by the United States Department of Commerce Bureau of Navigation, the agency then responsible for radio regulation, instead of the experimental license issued to other early commercial broadcasters.

The Scripps family owned newspaper hired Michael DeLisle Lyons, a teenage whiz kid and tinkerer to build a transmitter in the Detroit News building and had him apply for the amateur license in his own name. He built a transmitter licensed from a design by radio pioneer Lee de Forest.   Lyons was an employee Clarence “C. S”. Thompson, a New York City associate of de Forest and the owner of Radio News & Music, Inc.  which was attempting to market broadcast services to newspapers.  The Detroit station turned out to be their first and only customer.  As an amateur station it broadcast on the fringe of the available spectrum designated then as 200 meters, the equivalent of 1500 AM.  

Later that year young Lyons and his brother Frank built that nation’s first radios for police prowl cars for the city of Toledo, Ohio.  When in their first use of operation radio communications led to the quick arrest of a prowler and the story went national it, spurred other departments to adoptthe bulky, balky new technology.

The infant station’s news broadcasts were read by newspaper staffersand adapted from the content of the paper.  At first the company would not allow broadcast of any news that had not already hit the streets in print for fear of “giving away the product.”

Few homescould hear them anyway.  The audienceconsisted mostly of radio hobbyists including other amateur broadcasts who were becoming known as HAMs and those who built their own crystal sets.  Home receivers with amplificationand which did not require headphones were about five years in the futurewith the introduction of the vacuum tube.

Despite its limitations, the Scripps family was encouraged by a small but enthusiastic response.  They applied for a commercial license and on October 13, 1921, the station was assigned the call letters WBL broadcasting at 833 AM, with weather reports and other government reports broadcast at 619 AM.

On March 3, 1922 the stations call letters were changed to WWJ.  In the following year the Department of Commerce re-organized its assignments of frequencies and dropped the requirement for a separate frequency for weather and government reports.  WWJ’s was changed three times during the late 20’s before settling at 920 AM in 1929.  A war time shuffling of frequencies in 1941 moved the station to 950 AM at which it continues to broadcast to this day.

The station has maintained a regular schedule of news broadcast through all its incarnations of call letters, frequency or ownership to this day.  Since the mid-70’s the station, now a CBS Radio network affiliate, has broadcast as a 24 hour a day newsand talk station.  It remains a Detroit institution and is frequently the highest rated radio station in its market.

Molly Ivins, the extraordinary newspaper columnist, wit, and the enemy of foolishness, vanity, and avarice at every level of government, was born on August 30, 1944 in Monterey, California.  But she was raised in and around Houston, Texas and was a passionate Texan all her life from the tip of her head to the paint on her toenails.  

Her father was an autocratic oil company executive and she grew up in privileged circumstances.  At her tony private prep school she wrote for the school paper and enjoyed performing in stage productions.  Whatever she tried her hand at was pursued with the ardor of her admittedly big personality. 

After an unhappy freshman year at Scripts College, she transferred to Smith, a Seven Sisters college that brought her close to the love of her life, Yale student Henry “Hank” Holland, Jr.  When he was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1964, Ivins was crushed.  She never found anyone who would measure up to his memory and stayed single the rest of her life, dedicating herself to her studies and career.  After a year of study in Paris, she graduated in 1966 and went on to earn a master’s degree at Columbia Journalism School the next year. 

Her first job was with Minneapolis Tribune.  After a stint as the first female police reporter in the city, she covered a beat called Movements for Social Change, where she notes that she wrote about “militant blacks, angry Indians, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers.”  She had met her people.  

In 1970 she left a perfectly good job to return to Texas to write for The Texas Observer, a progressive bi-weekly and burr under the saddle to the Austin establishment.  She became co-editor of the paper and the chief political writer, specializing in the doings of the legislature.  Before long her pithy accounts of that colorful body were being re-printed nationally and Ivins was soon contributing op-ed pieces to the New York Times and Washington Post and becoming a popular speaker on college campuses.

In 1976 the Times hired her, supposedly to loosen up their staid writing style.  She certainly did that, often clashing with editorsover her colorful, salty language.  She was made Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief, which would have been quite an honor if she was not also the entire bureau covering 9 states—states that the editors hardly seemed to know existed or cared to know much about.  Her clashes with editor Abe Rosenthal were legendary. 

She was delighted when the Dallas Times Herald offered her a position as a columnist.  She became such an irritation to Dallas city authorities and others with lots of wealth and influencethat the paper sent her to Austin.  After the Herald folded, Ivins moved to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram where she continued her Austin-based column and her relentless attacks on cupidity.  From her seat in Austin, she chronicled the rise of George W. Bush, who she referred to as the Shrub.  When he was elected President, Ivins ended her 19 year run at the Star-Telegram and wrote a nationally syndicated column carried in more the 400 papers. 

In 1999 she was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer.  She battled the disease with typical ferocity and good humor, twice being declared cancer free only to have the tumorsreturn.  In December 2006 she took leave from her column to again undergo treatment. She wrote two columns in January 2007, but returned to the hospital for further treatment then died at her Austin home on January 31, 2007, at age 62.

Here is what I wrote in a blog entry the next day:

Flags at half mast, folks. Molly Ivins, a true American hero has died.  When we can least afford to lose her.  She was just about the only major liberal voice in the press who did not sound like, at least occasionally, a prig, twit, or snob.  She never forgot ordinary working people and their lives and they knew it

With keen insight, shrewd wit, and unparalleled Texas charm she belled the fat cats of politics.  From ordinary petty grafters in the state legislature all the way up to George W. “Shrub” Bush himself, no miscreant escaped her attention.

She fought up to the end.  Knowing she was dying she filed her last column in mid-January.  It ended:

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to stop this war. Raise hell! Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush’s proposed surge [to the Iraq War]...We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, ‘STOP IT NOW!’

Amen, sister!

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040352/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-08-29_The_inherent_worth.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040321/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/08-29-21-audio.mp3

"The Power of Focus" (August 29, 2021) Worship Service

Steve Jobs is famous for his message on focus, the power of focus. In a different way, the same message has power for our spiritual and moral lives. After all, have you noticed how what we look for in the world in part determines what we find? Or how consciously deciding what we want to make happen also requires us to surrender to not making other things happen if we are to have any chance at meeting our goal? Or how choosing the qualities we put forward in the world also necessitates spiritual practices and focused time for reflection to be able to cultivate those qualities in our character and habits of the heart. As we begin to step into a new year of school, of work after summer, of church and community life, this Sunday is one chance to reflect on where each of us might choose to focus our energies.

Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern, Senior Minister; Dennis Adams, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, organist; Brielle Marina Nielson, mezzo soprano; Mark Sumner, pianist; Jon Silk, drummer; Asher Davison, song leader & clarinetist

Eric Shackelford, camera; Shulee Ong, camera; Jonathan Silk, OOS Design & sound; Joe Chapot, live chat moderator; Judy Payne, flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040252/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210829VRSSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040229/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210829.mp3

Hurricane Idais gathering strength as it barrels north in the Gulf of Mexico and will slam into the Louisiana coast as a strong category 4 stormabout 1 pm this afternoon.  Passing west of New Orleans the worst of winds of more than 150 mile per hour and an expected storm surge of up to 17 feet at the mouth of the Mississippi and 8 feet upriver at Lake Pontchartrain are expected to be catastrophic.  It is exactly 16 years since Hurricane Katrina wrecked its devastation.

Hopefully the Big Easy and other vulnerable Gulf communities will be better prepared this time around.  Lessonsof that big storm, reinforced by three storms that slammed the same area last year.  Sea walls and levees have been reinforced and raised.  Residents are more apt to positivelyrespond to calls for early evacuations and plans for those evacuations are said to be better.  New Orleans and other areas have lost as much as a quarter of their pre-Katrina populations somewhat easing the pressure.  City and State resources have been pumped up.  And perhaps most critically the Federal response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will be in the hands of competent and experience professionals fully backed by President Joe Biden who unlike George W. Bushactually believes that government can function.

On the other hand, Louisiana is already in the grips of one of the worst Coronavirus Delta variant outbreaks in the country.  Its hospitals are already overwhelmed.  Masking, social distancing, and sanitation protocols, only tepidly supported by the Republican governor and legislature will be impossible to maintain especially in crowded shelters and on evacuation busses.   Vaccination rates are low.  A sharp spike in new infections is likely just as hospitals are least able to deal with critical cases.

There is still political and social tension between the Democratic city government and the Republican controlled state that can easily scuttle cooperation and lead to new rounds of blame shifting and finger pointing when things go wrong.

Systematic racism is the political and cultural order of the day along the Gulf Coast.  Poor Black residents may still be denied equal access to emergency aid and be blocked from evacuation through or to wealthy white enclaves.

We can hope for the best but must be ready for the worst.

A look back at Katrina reminds us of an enduring rage and sorrow.

On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast with the eyejust east of New Orleans.  Winds had diminished and the storm had been downgraded from a Category 4 to a Category 3 and there was some hope that the city and surrounding Parishesmight be spared the destruction predicted earlier in the week.  Although wind damage was severe, a lot of folks breathed deeply after the brunt of the storm moved past.

But the storm surge sent as much as 15 feet of water inland floodingthe low lying coast from the Texas border to nearly Pensacola.  It pushed up the Mississippi and into Lake Pontchartrain.  Within a few hours the levy system protecting the city broke in several places and water inundated most of the city.  Especially hard hit were the low lying neighborhoods along the canals and directly under the levies, including the largely Black and impoverished 8thand 9th Wards.  By 11 p.m. Mayor Ray Nagin described the loss of life as significant with reports of bodies floating on the water throughout the city.

As horrible as the situation was, it was only the beginning.  Evacuation orders had encouraged many of those with vehicles to flee north.  But the highways were soon clogged and those lateto leave were trapped.  No plans had been made for the hundreds of thousands of city residents without transportation, or the aged and ill.  The poor were essentially trapped in the city.  And as they drowned talking heads on television scolded them for not heeding the evacuation orders.

The story of the immediate misery of the next few days has been toldand retold and is far too vast to be recounted here.  Suffice it to say the disaster unmasked incompetence at every level of government compounded by a blasé racismeager to blame the victims.  The response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), headed by political toadies and lickspittles, became a national scandal.  But it was the inevitable result of George W. Bush’s administration which had as its highest goal to provethat government is inherently incapable of managing things efficiently.

The disaster created a diaspora.  Eighty percent of the New Orleans population fled.  Five years later less than half had returned.  And much of the city, particularly the Black Wards away from the restored tourist areas, remained a waste land.

The youth group of my church, then known as the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Woodstock, spent a week there in July 2010, nearly five years after the storm, doing service projects.  They brought back video and photographic evidence of the distressing situation.  There will be work rebuilding and restoring homes in those districts for hundreds of youth groups for years to come.

When historians look back on the disaster and its long aftermath years from now, they may well conclude that this was the moment when the traditional cocky confidence of American exceptionalism bit the dust and the Empirebegan it precipitous decline.

University of Mississippi students hold a bullet ridden Emmett Till historical marker before carrying it to a Confederate monument on campus. 

 The horrific and unthinkably brutal lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year old Chicago boy visiting rural Mississippi on August 28, 1955 for allegedly whistling at a White woman still challenges America’s racist character.   This year on the anniversary the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture announced that it was putting on display a bullet riddled historical marker from the site where Till’s mutilated body was thrown into a river weighted down with a 70 pound cotton gin fan blade.  It was the third of four markers vandalized, shot up by self-proclaimed Ku Klux Klansmen who posed for social media photos with their handiwork.  It was replaced a fourth time by a bullet proof marker which was also vandalized but not destroyed.

Before arriving at the Museum, the marker played a key roll in the bitter and divisive movement to remove Confederate monuments from public places.  In 1919 students at the University of Mississippi carried Till’s marker through campus after a panel discussion hosted by the Emmett Till Memorial Commission to Memorial for the Confederate War Deadwhich had been the target of on-going protests demanding its removal—part of a wave of such protests sparked by Black Lives Matter Movement.  That movement owed its inspiration in no small part to Emmett’s mother Mamie who insisted that his horribly disfigured body be displayed in an open casket at his funeralto show “what they did to my boy.”

Mamie Till's decision to display her mutilated son's body in an open casket funeral helped rally the Civil Rights Movement in the South.

In 1955 Till’s martyrdom helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement.  Although I don’t recall his name being mentioned at Dr. Martin Luther King’s milestone March on Washington for Jobs and Justice exactly eight years later in 1963 that event, broadcast liveon national television was a testament on how far the movement had come in just a few years.

But it also inspired the Klan, White Citizen’s Councils, and other night-riding terrorists.  The failure of local courts to convict the known perpetrators of the outrage convinced white supremacists that they were untouchable and had the full support of the wider community.  That led to years of lynchings, assassinations, assaults, bombings, and mob intimidation executed with impunity.   

Eventually Federal intervention and enforcement, no matter how reluctant, shifting public opinion, and the simple weariness of many white Southerners with the cycle of protests and violent reprisal that was hurting the businesses.  Slowly a much ballyhooed “New South” emerged that grudgingly accepted integrationand Black voters with significant political power.  Old Firebrands and Alabama Governor George Wallace changed their tunes.  The Klan went back underground seldom to be mentionedor acknowledged.

Emmett Till, left, was linked to Trayvon Martin, and Mike Brown whose deaths helped spark the Black Lives Matter Movement.

The overflowing outrage at police executions of Black citizens and the street confrontations of the Black Lives Matter Movement ripped theband-aid off an old scab.  The Klan and other white nationalist who had never really gone away but who operated on the fringes of society were empowered again by the Trump Era and the dog-whistle of “Make America Great Again.”  Attacks on Confederate monuments brought them to center stage as defenders of tradition and heritage.  Since Charlottesville violent confrontations with anti-racists and anti-fascists have become common.  Scores of groups swelledin membership.  Demanding their “First Amendment right to bear arms” often with the support and complicity of right wing state and local governments, has turned them out in great numbers in combat gear and armed with automatic weapons.  They even became emboldened to attempt coup d’état last January at the Capitol.  That comic opera putsch may have been premature, but they are laying the groundwork for a second insurrection.

Emmett Till is once again a convenient symbol and rallying cry for both sides of the great divide.  Not only was the river site marker defaced, but another historical marker at the site of the general store where Till allegedly insulted pure white Southern womanhood.  Has also been shot up on multiple occasions.  One of the markers is now on exhibit at The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.

No one is yet raising monuments to Till’s murderers or to the current crop of terrorists, but it may only be a matter of time. 

Note—For a full review of Emmett Till’s life and death, his mother’s crusade, and the search for justice visit my 2015 blog post The Legacy of Emmett Till 60 Years Later.

Sean Callahan, an awe struck admirer and authorof the book Margaret Bourke-White: Photographer noted, “The woman who had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean, strafed by the Luftwaffe, stranded on an Arctic island, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled out of the Chesapeake when her chopper crashed, was known to the Lifestaff as ‘Maggie the Indestructible.”  But the pioneering photographer and war correspondent turned out to be not quite so indestructible.  In 1953 at the height of her creative powers and fame she began to notice alarming symptoms which turned out to be Parkinson’s Disease, then untreatable.  She endured a slow deterioration which forced her into semi-retirement by 1957 and ended all of her work by 1968.  She endured with the disease for 18 years before dying of it in near poverty on August 27, 1971 in Stamford,Connecticut.

Margaret White was born in New York City on June 14, 1904.  Her father, Joseph White, an immigrant secularized Polish Jew who was a naturalist, engineer,and inventor.  Her mother was Minnie Bourke, an American born Irish Catholic.  Both parents, however, eschewed their birth faiths and were ardent free thinkers.  The family, including young Maggie and sister and brother, were comfortably middle class, and soon left the city for the leafy small town of Bound Brook, New Jersey, a historic burb on the Raritan River in the north central part of the state.

Maggie, like her brother and older sister, worshiped her brilliant father, a perfectionist with high expectations of his offspring.  Her artistic mother was also a feminist who imbued her with the notion not to allow herself to be limited by customary gender roles.  All the children were imbued with a mission to serve humanity, even save, the world through relentless self-improvement and achievement.

While a student at Plainfield High School, Margaret picked up a passion for photography from her father who was fascinated by cameras and interested in nature photography.  After graduation from high school, she was interested in becoming a professional photographer—a business with few successful women practitioners—but followed her father’s advice to pursue science.

In 1922 White enrolled at Columbia University in New York to study herpetology—the study of snakes and reptiles.  But while at Columbia she took photography classes with Clarence Hudson White, founder of the Photo-Secession movement with Alfred Stieglitz which re-invigorated her interest in the medium.  Her time at Columbia, however, was cut short by the sudden and devastating death of her father after one semester.

White never returned to Columbia.  She restlessly moved from school to school driven by her often impossibly high expectations of the institutions, her own perfectionism, and a bristling refusal to bow to any restrictionsplaced on her as a woman.  Romance and its failure may also have played a part. White married fellow student Everett Chapman in 1924 and divorced him just two years later. She studied successively at the University of Michigan, Perdue, and Western Reserve University inCleveland, Ohio, before finally settling in comfortably at Cornell, in Ithaca, New York.  Perhaps it helped that Ithaca reminded her of her New Jersey home.  When she graduated she left a remarkable portfolio of campus photos for the student newspaper which concentrate on buildings and architectural detail.

Despite the odds against her, White was determined to pursue a career as a photographer.  A year after graduating from Cornell in 1927 she established her own commercial photography studio in Cleveland, Ohio where she specialized in architectural and industrial work.  Symbolically, she abandoned her married name and the adopted the hyphenated name Bourke-White to preserve her independence and honor her mother equally with her father.

In her early days Bourke-White struggled to get commissions.  Her breakthrough came when she got a job from the Otis Steel Company to document their production process.  Even though she had been hired by the company, their security agents tried to block her access in the shaky grounds that steel was a defense industry and photos of production could risk the national security and plant superintendents and foremen worried that a mere woman could not stand the intense heatand danger of being close to blast furnaces and molten metal.  She got her way around these objections with flirtatious eyelash batting, and when that didn’t work, terrifying bullying.

Once in the plants Bourke-White quickly discovered technical challenges.  She set up what she thought were brilliant, dramatic shots of steel being pouredthen discovered in the dark room that the black and white film she was using was not sensitive to the glowing red and orange of hot steel—the molten metalcame out nearly black in prints.  She solved the problem by lighting her shots by having assistants hold magnesium flares which produced a brilliant white light.  The aids sometimes had to be positioned dangerously close to the flowing steel and showering sparks, but she was heedless of their—and her own—safety.  The results were stunning.  No photographer had ever before captured the dazzling drama of hot steel.  When the shots were published, Bourke-White was recognized as a master of her medium.

That 1928 shoot led directly to a prestigious new job as associate editorand staff photographer for Fortune magazine in 1929.  In 1930 the magazine sent her to the Soviet Union where she became one of the first western photojournaliststo document Russian industry under communism.  That trip would help make her welcome a decade later when she was posted to Moscow as a foreign correspondent.

In 1936 Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Fortune bought the failing old humor magazine Life just for its name.  He wanted to launch a new weekly newsmagazine that would rely mostly on photography to tell its stories—a newsreel on slick paperas he envisioned it.  Bourke-White, already working for him at Fortuneand who had the strong support of Luce’s feminist wife Clair Boothe Luce,was his first hire for the new project.  Not only was she a photographer, but she set up the sophisticated photo lab that would be required to process and print the hundreds, often thousands of images that would pour into magazine every week from around the world.  When the new magazine hit the newsstands on November 23, 1936, Bourke-White photo of the Fort Peck Dam was on the cover.  The new magazine was an immediate success and almost instantly a national institution.

Luce was an arch conservative and rabid anti-New Dealer, which was reflected in the editorial content of the magazine.  Hardly anyone, however, read Luce’s ranting editorials.  They turned to the magazine for the dramatic coverage of the world around them, including the stark poverty of the Depression years.  Luce never seemed to learn that the pictures that he printed worked against all of his politics.  Pictures by Bourke-White and others evoked sympathyfor the plight of workers, and celebrated he triumphs of things like CCC camps and WPA public works projects and actually rallied public support for the New Deal.  Luce never learned this lesson and in later years coverage of his photographers of the Civil Rights Movement, the emerging counterculture of the ‘60’s, and the experience of grunts on the ground in Vietnam all worked against his personal political agenda.

Bourke-White, who had made her reputation photographing industry, turned more and more to human subjects in her coverage of the Great Depression.  In 1937 she toured the South dramatically documenting conditions there.  The results were iconic photos like the one published on February 15, 1937 of displaced Black flood victims lined up for food in front of a huge billboard of a smiling white family in an automobilewith the tag line “World’s Highest Standard of Living—There’s No Way Like the American Way.”  Seldom was there a more deeply subversive photo ever published.

Besides shooting for Time, Bourke-White took her own photos on her swing through the South then collaboratedon a book with Erskine Caldwell, the Georgia-born Southern gothic novelistbest known for God’s Little Acre. Caldwell wrote the text and Bourke-White provided the photo illustrations and both collaborated on the captions.  Caleb Crain described the process in a 2009 New Yorker article:

Bourke-White lay in wait for her subjects with a flash and wrote with pleasure of having them “imprisoned on a sheet of film before they knew what had happened.” The resulting portraits are by turns sentimental and grotesque, and she and Caldwell printed them with contrived first-person captions.

The resulting book, Have You Seen Their Faces was published by Viking Press, with a paperback version by Modern Age Books following quickly.  It pre-dated the more celebrated collaboration of James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men published in 1941 by four years.

The work with Caldwell also led to romance.  The couple married in 1939 and divorced in 1942 largely due to Bourke-White’s lengthy absences on overseas assignments.

Those assignments came as tensions in Europe were on the rise.  She was dispatched to survey what everyday life was like under the Fascists in Italy, Nazis in Germany, and Soviet Communists.  Despite being under tight surveillanceand often escorted by handlers meant to make sure that she only took positive photos, her keen eye was able to pick out many telling moments.  In the Soviet Union, her earlier visit there led to unprecedented access, including to Joseph Stalin himself in an informal an un-posed session which even caught the usually stern dictator laughing.

When War broke out in 1939, Bourke-White applied for credentialsas a war correspondent to various governments.  She even gave up her full time job at Time, which did not want to send her in harm’s way, in 1940 to become a freelance correspondent sending photos and articles to several American newspapers.  She did continue to sell pictures to Time and was eventually rehired by them to be a war correspondent.

In fact, Bourke-White became the first accredited American female war correspondent.  She was back in Moscow when Germany broke the Hitler-Stalin Pact and attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.  In fact, she was the only western photographer in the Capital as the city came under Luftwaffe bombardment which set of firestorms.  She photographed the burning city from the roof of the American Embassy.

When the United States entered the war, Bourke-White became the first woman correspondent.  She was first attached to the Army Air Force in North Africa and became the first woman to fly on Combat bombing missions.  At desert air bases she had to dive for cover from strafing, and dive bombing Stukas.  Later she was assigned to Army infantry and artillery in Italy where the Army was bogged down in a grueling mountain campaigning.   She won the respect of the troops for her courage under frequent fire.

In between, Bourke-White was onboard the British troop ship SS Strathallanbound to North Africa from Englandwhen it was torpedoed and sunk.  She turned to the experience into the photo essay Women in Lifeboats which appeared in Life on February 22, 1943. 

Toward the end of the war Bourke-White toured recently capturedand occupied German territory with General George Patton.  She was with him at Buchenwald short days after the Death Camp was liberated.  The experience shook her to the core:

Using a camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me.

The photos she took, and which were published in Time were among the first and most detailed images of the horror that Americans got to see.  After the war she assembled and wrote Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly: A Report On The Collapse Of Hitler’s Thousand Years.  It was an eyewitness account of devastated Germany after the war in which she displayed scant sympathy for the German civilians she held responsible for the rise of Hitler and still, in the face of overwhelming mounting evidence of atrocities, remained in denialabout national guilt and their own responsibility for the wretched conditions to which they had been lowered.   It was a tough book—and a highly controversial one.  

Among Bourke-Whites most important post-war assignments was the independence of the Indian sub-continent and the bloody partition of India and Pakistan.  She photographed all of the key players.  Her photograph of Mohandas Gandhi emaciated from fasting and sitting at his spinning wheel became one of the most recognizable images of him.  There was a stern photo of Pakistani founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah sitting upright in a chair.  But it was the photos of the devastating partition violence that stood out.  Somini Sengupta, a noted Indian journalist working for the New York Times called Bourke-White’s photographs “gut-wrenching, and staring at them, you glimpse the photographer's undaunted desire to stare down horror…Bourke-White’s photographs seem to scream from the page.” In 1948 she was back in India and again photographed and interviewed Gandhi hours before his assassination.

These pictures were taken just two years after her experience at Buchenwald.  Bourke-White had seen more than her share of the horrors that humanity was capable of.

She continued to do fine work for Life until her Parkinson’s forced her retirement.  Even then she kept up a limited amount of freelance work.  But the tremorsof the disease made it increasingly difficult to hold a camera steady or to do the dark room work that she relished.  Experimental surgeriesto her nervous system in 1959 and 1961 reduced the tremors, but drastically affected her speech.  And the procedures could not halt the slow march of her body toward paralysis.

Unable to do much with her camera, Bourke-White penned a bestselling memoir, Portrait of Myselfpublished in 1963. 

She spent the rest of the decade in failing healthand increasing isolation in her Darien, Connecticut home.  A generous Time-Life pension and royalties from her books and photographs could not keep up with the rapidly mounting cost of her medical expenses and the need for 24 hour a day nursing care.  By the time she finally slipped away, she was broke.

Burke-White’s photos are on display and in the collections of several museums including the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as in the collection of the Library of Congress.

The rise of academic women’s studies almost on the heels of her death helped revive interest in Bourke-White and elevated her to new status as an inspirational role model.  Candice Bergen played her in the Academy Award winning film Gandhi in 1982 and Farrah Fawcett portrayed her in a made-for-TV bio pic, Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White in 1989.

Two of the pond plants are starting to flower: the cardinal flower, and the arrowhead plant. The cardinal flower is supposed to be a favorite for hummingbirds. I hope they find it. The frogs continue to bring delight by their patient sitting poses, or quick jumping into the depths when startled. One day I counted a total of 13 frogs–usually I can find 3 big ones, and from 5 to 10 small ones, depending on the day and time of day. My little Zoom camera stopped working, so I am using the iPhone camera, which doesn’t work well for close-ups. But check out the flowers on the arrowhead plant. And, can you find the hidden frog in this photo?

If you are still looking for the frog, here is a clue: her eyes and head are hidden by green plant leaves, and only her legs and body are barely visible against the stones. At first I thought her legs were dead plant leaves. With all of the pain and sorrow in the world, these simple beauties bring nurture to my spirit.

Margy and I were delighted to be part of the Resilience Hub‘s Permaculture Open House last Saturday, and welcomed about a dozen people to our yard to share the highs and lows of permaculture gardening. Including, of course, sitting by the pond and talking about pond building. Everyone was careful about our COVID protocols, and we met some really great people.

Since then we have harvested our elderberries–Margy cut the berry clusters one evening, and then the next morning I read online that they should be processed or frozen within twelve hours. So my morning was spent gently separating the berries from of their clusters, rinsing them in a big pot, and then freezing them until I had time to make elderberry syrup. This was our first harvest from the bush, which grew huge this season.

My other big harvesting job this week has been processing more kale. Because of the netting I put over the raised bed, I am cutting the lower leaves of all the plants at once, rather than bit by bit as I have done in prior years. I put them into this blue plastic bushel basket. Then, one by one, I cut them up, rinse a batch in a salad spinner, and then sauté them batch by batch before freezing in quart freezer bags. I’ve only finished about half this bunch–and there will of course be more to harvest later.

Finally, I will say that our zucchini harvests have been just the right amount so far for us to be eating as we go, but our cucumbers are going wild! We don’t pickle them, but just eat them raw–if you live nearby, please come and get some from us! They are really delicious, but we’ll never keep up. The photo below is only some of them!

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040209/https://findingourwayhomeblog.files.wordpress.com/2021/08/cardinal-flower-1.jpg

On August 24, 1989 Pete Rose aka Charlie Hustle was banned from baseball for life for gambling on Cincinnati Reds games when he was manager by an outraged Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti.

Considered a shoo-in for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot, Rose probably doomed his chances for ever being included by for years steadfastly denyinggambling on baseball despite mounting evidence, before sheepishly admitting guilt in his autobiography My Prison Without Bars. 

Rose was a hometown product of Cincinnati, born to working class parentsin 1941.  The switch hitting right hander’s dream came true when he was called to the Big Show in 1963. In his stellar 23 year career as a player, most of the time with the Reds, Rose hit for a .303 batting average, tallied 4,256 hitsincluding 160 home runs and drove in a total of 1,394 runs.  He was famously aggressive on the base pathsdespite not being a fast runner and perfected a dangerous head-first slide. 

Among his many honors were Rookie of the Year in the National League in 1963, two Gold Gloves for his sparkling defensive play, three batting titles, 17 All Star Game appearances, and three World Championships with Cincinnati’s legendary Big Red Machine.  After playing for the Philadelphia Phillies and Montreal Expos from 1979 to ’84, controversial Reds owner Marge Schott brought Rose back as a player-managerto finish the ’84 season. 

He played two more years in the combined role before retiring to concentrate on his bench duties.  He was undoubtedly the most popular player in Reds history and one of the most admired in baseball. 

But he was an inveterate gambler.  He claimed his regular bets with a major bookie did not include baseball, then after proof surfaced, that he did not bet on games he was part of.  When that claim, too, was disproven, he could only say that he bet for his team, not against it. 

But gambling is the big no-no in Major League Base which was nearly killed by scandals in the 19th Century and again by the Black Sox scandal of 1919.  Baseball ignored a lot of misbehavior, including the nearly murderous attacks of Ty Cobb on fans, regular alcohol abuse by stars like Babe Ruth, and numerous instances of sexual peccadilloes.  It would not, however, forgive gambling. 

After his banishment Rose cut a pathetic figure.  Banned from even setting foot into a ball park, he made his living signing autographs and selling memorabilia.  Even that got him into trouble.  On April 20, 1990, Rose pleaded guilty to two charges of filing false income tax returns for not reporting income from selling autographs and memorabilia, and from horse racing winnings. He was sentenced to five months in the medium security Prison Camp at the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois and fined $50,000. Released on January 7, 1991 after having paid $366,041 in back taxes and interest he was required to perform 1000 hours of community service. 

Rose’s 2004 autobiography was an attempt to both bring in much needed income and rehabilitate his reputation, possibly leading to a lifting of the lifelong ban and eligibility for the Hall of Fame.  Despite the vocal support of many players and some sportswriters, the book failed on the later count.

The steroid scandals of the early 21st Century were used by supporters to argue that Rose, who never used performance enhancing drugs and who played hard his entire career, deserved consideration to be included in the Hall while disgraced players like Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens remain eligible. 

Baseball is officially un-moved by these arguments. After rumors that he was considering lifting the ban surfaced in 2010, Commissioner Bud Selig quickly denied the reports.  Selig’s successor has been no more sympathetic and many of the sportswriters who admired and championed him have retired.  Baseball has moved on.  It is doubtful Pete Rose will ever enter the Hall of Fame. 

Edgar Lee Masters was the author of one of the greatest single volumes of American poetry ever—The Spoon River Anthology.  That book in which the denizens of a small 19th Century Illinois village graveyardtell their stories, is still a shockand an eye opener for anyone who bought into the Disney version of small town life as a kind of perfect idyll.

Masters was born on August 23, 1868 in Kansas where his father had briefly established a law practice.  When that failedthe family moved back to his grandparents farm near Petersburg in Menard County, Illinois.  In 1880 the family moved again to nearby Lewistown where the boy attended high school and showed an interest in both writing and following his father’s shaky footsteps in the law.  He had his first publication in the Chicago Daily News—a Democratic challenger to the dominance and hegemony in the state of the Republican Chicago Tribune.

In the late 1880’s he attended Knox Academy, the prep school for Knox College but was forced to drop outwhen his family could no longer support him.  After that he read law at his father’s office.  His dad was the village Freethinker and thus something of an outcast.  The practice revolved around the margins of local life, petty civil cases for those who could not afford the lawyers who hobnobbed with the judges and bankers, criminal cases, divorces, anything that exposed the underside of the community.  It was an eye-opening experience.

After passing the Bar, young Masters hot footed it out of town to Chicago in 1893 where he hoped to advance both his legal and writing careers. He went into practice with Kickham Scanlan and began to publish poetry under the name Dexter Wallace.

In 1898 he married the daughter of a prominent lawyer and began a family that grew to three children including a daughter Marsha who grew up to be a poet and a son Hilary who became a novelist.  But the union grew stormy due to Master’s extramarital affairs.

In 1903 Masters went into partnership with Clarence Darrow, already noted as a top labor and defense attorney.  They were united in their Democratic politics, instinctive radicalism, Freethought, and admiration for the labor Democrat hero, Governor John Peter Altgeld.  As a junior partner in the firm, Masters handled mostly routine criminal and civil cases for the poor, often pro bono.

Despite an amicable beginning, the partnership foundered in 1908 and formally broke up in 1911 due to a business dispute with Darrow and a messy, scandalous marriage.    Despite the bitter personal falling out, he remained an admirer of Darrow.

Masters published two little noted volumesof poetry under pen names in 1898 and 1910.

During his hiatus from the active practice of law as his partnership with Darrow disintegrated he began work on writing and polishing poems inspired by his hometown.  In 1914 he began to publish these in Reedy’s Mirror out of St. Louis under another nom de plume, Webster Ford.  A year later the poems were collected and issued as The Spoon River Anthology with the assistance and encouragement of Harriet Monroe of Poetry Magazine to instant critical and popular acclaim.

Suddenly the obscure lawyer was famous.  He gradually wound down the practice of law to concentrate on a literary career.  Although he was embittered in old age that none of his subsequent work got the attention of that classic, he produced prolifically and with great skill.  In all there were 19 more volumes of verse including a sequel The New Spoon River, 12 plays, 6 novels, and 7 biographies.  Among the subjects of his biographies were fellow Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman to each of whom he owed a debt of gratitude.

His 1931 bio Lincoln the Man was a highly controversial self-proclaimed de-mythologizing of the Prairie President.  In part it was a direct refutation of fellow Illinois poet Carl Sandburg’slyrical and lionizing biographies.  His jealousy of Sandburg was well known, but he seems to have been most influenced a loyalty to the Democratic Party of the 19th Century which was already vanishing outside the Deep South.  He pictured Lincoln as a Whig tool of the banks and railroads from the beginning in service to concentrated wealthagainst the common man.  He was pictured as tyrant who rushed the country into an unwanted war to the applause of Eastern elites.  The book was a popular success in the South, but it virtually destroyed his own reputation with the liberal literary establishment, many previously admiring critics turning against his whole body of work.

He had quit the practice of law entirely by 1920 and moved to New York to concentrate on writing.  Masters finally divorced his first wife in 1923 years after abandoning the family.   In 1926 he married Ellen Coyne with whom he had another son, Hardin.

Although Masters won plaudits and honors including the Mark Twain Silver Medalin 1936, the Poetry Society of Americamedal in 1941, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1942, and the Shelly Memorial Award in 1944 he never matched the fame and glory of his contemporary Carl Sandberg and often felt snubbedthe Eastern and academic poetry elite.  He was not experimental enough to be ranked with the Imagistsand modernists. 

He died March 5, 1950, in a convalescent home near Philadelphia and was buried back home in Petersburg in the cemetery that inspired his greatest book.

Here are samples of Masters’ work.  First from The Spoon River Anthology:

Jim Brown was the trainer of a famous trotting horse, Dom Pedro.

Jim Brown

While I was handling Dom Pedro

I got at the thing that divides the race between men who are

For singing “Turkey in the straw” or “There is a fountain filled with blood”—

(Like Rile Potter used to sing it over at Concord);

For cards, or for Rev. Peet’s lecture on the holy land;

For skipping the light fantastic, or passing the plate;

For Pinafore, or a Sunday school cantata;

For men, or for money;

For the people or against them.

This was it:

Rev. Peet and the Social Purity Club,

Headed by Ben Pantier’s wife,

Went to the Village trustees,

And asked them to make me take Dom Pedro

From the barn of Wash McNeely, there at the edge of town,

To a barn outside of the corporation,

On the ground that it corrupted public morals.

Well, Ben Pantier and Fiddler Jones saved the day—

They thought it a slam on colts.

—Edgar Lee Masters

Masters was not so down on Lincoln in those days as reflected in one of the most famous pieces from the collection.  Ann Rutledge’s grave, not far from the poet’s, is now marked with this poem. 

Ann Rutledge

Out of me unworthy and unknown

The vibrations of deathless music;

“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,

And the beneficient face of a nation

Shining with justice and truth.

I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,

Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,

Wedded to him, not through union,

But through separation.

Bloom forever, O Republic,

From the dust of my bosom!

—Edgar Lee Masters

And finally, from a later collection a glimpse of the restless soul, the Freethinker taunted by a spiritual yearning he barely understood.

Inexorable Deities  

Deities!

Inexorable revealers,

Give me strength to endure

The gifts of the Muses,

Daughters of Memory.

When the sky is blue as Minerva’s eyes

Let me stand unshaken;

When the sea sings to the rising sun

Let me be unafraid;

When the meadow lark falls like a meteor

Through the light of afternoon,

An unloosened fountain of rapture,

Keep my heart from spilling

Its vital power;

When at the dawn

The dim souls of crocuses hear the calls

Of waking birds,

Give me to live but master the loveliness.

Keep my eyes unharmed from splendors

Unveiled by you,

And my ears at peace

Filled no less with the music

Of Passion and Pain, growth and change.

But O ye sacred and terrible powers,

Reckless of my mortality,

Strengthen me to behold a face,

To know the spirit of a beloved one

Yet to endure, yet to dare!

—Edgar Lee Masters

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040146/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-08-22_Possibilities_ever_emergent.mp3

"I Know Nothing" (August 22, 2021) Worship Service

In the millions of acres of trees, in the dark and light, the shadows, the dappled light along canyon walls and rivers, there is real knowing. What is it, to surrender, to let go of having to know, to do, and to let it be enough that the elements sing?

Rev. J.D. Benson, Guest Minister; Mari Magaloni Ramos, Worship Associate; Asher Davison, bass-baritone; Wm. Garcia Ganz, accompanist; Nancy Cooke Munn, songleader; Mark Sumner, pianist

Eric Shackelford, camera; Shulee Ong, camera; Jonathan Silk, OOS Design & sound; Joe Chapot, live chat moderator; Judy Payne, flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Order of Service:
https://bit.ly/20210822OSWeb2

LIVESTREAM:
https://youtu.be/dl5AOdg58-g

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040119/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20210822JDBSermon.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111040058/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/08-22-21-audio.mp3

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111035957/https://www.ascboston.org/downloads/podcast/210822.mp3

Dorothy Parker is one of those writers now more famous for who she was than what she wrote.  She will forever be etched in the public mind as the queen of the Algonquin Roundtable, that shifting group of Manhattan wits and sophisticateswho daily gathered at an Algonquin Hotel table to exchange barbs and bon mots.  Through the Roaring Twenties and into the early years of the Depression the pithy sayings of these gin fueled repasts were breathlessly repeated in gossip columns read as avidly in Peoria as on Park Avenue. 

Despite her own very real accomplishments, Parker recognized this and even reveled in it.  “Every day,” she said, “I get up, brush my teeth, and sharpen my tongue.”

But Parker was a widely respected magazine journalist, critic, and above all a poet.  Her volumes of humorous verse were beloved best sellers.

Parker was born on August 22, 1893 on the Jersey Shore where her middle class Manhattan parents kept a summer cabin.  Her birth name was Rothschild—her father was of German Jewish descent (not related to the banking family) and her mother was of Scottish ancestry.  Her mother, Eliza died while staying at the same cabin just before her 5th birthday setting off a troubled and unhappy childhood.

Young Dot, as she was called, hated her father’s new wife and referred to her contemptuously as the “the housekeeper.”  She claimed her father physically abused her.  She was openly glad when her stepmother died in 1903.  Despite a Jewish father and a Protestant birth mother, she was sent to the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament School probably in hopes that the stern nuns would reign in her wild rebelliousness.  It didn’t work.  She was expelled when she was 14 for calling the Immaculate Conception “spontaneous combustion.”

After that she was shipped of for an indifferent education at a New Jersey finishing school mostly to keep her out of her father’s hair.  She graduated at age 18 in 1911.  Two years later her father died leaving most of his estate to a sister.  Dorothy went to work playing piano at a dancing school to earn a living.  In her spare time, she was writing verse.

She quickly established a career as a writer after selling her first poem to Vanity Fair in 1914.  Soon after she was hired as a staff writer at a sister publication, Vogue then moved to a similar job at Vanity Fair two years later.

In 1917 she met and married stockbrokerEdwin Pond Parker II.  They were soon separated by his service in World War I.  Not that she minded much.  Ambivalent about her Jewish identity, especially because she hated her father, she later joked that she got married to acquire a WASP name.  After Parker’s return from the war, the marriage was stormy and eventually ended in divorce in 1926.

Parker’s career really took off when she took over theater reviews at Vanity Fair from the vacationing P.G. Woodhouse.  Her criticism was arch, acerbic, witty, and penetrating.  Readers loved it.  Skewered playwrights, producers, directors, and actors felt differently. 

Some Round Table members: Art Samuals, Charles MacArthur, Groucho Marx, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Wollcott.

Parker and fellow staff members Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood began to take a daily largely liquid lunch at the Algonquin Hotel.  They were soon joined by others and by 1919 folks were talking about the Roundtable.  Other early participants included Alexander Wolcott, newspaperman/playwright Charles MacArthur, Harpo Marx, sportswriter Haywood Broun and playwrights George F. Kaufmann and Marc Connolly.  Franklin Pierce Adams not only began posting quips from the table in his popular column The Conning Tower but printed whole poems by Parker and other members helping to make their public reputations.

Sometimes all the publicitythe wits received backfired.  Theater producers outraged over several quotes by Parker ridiculing their shows threatened to remove advertising from her employer.  Vanity Fair fired her. Benchley and Sherwood walked out in solidarity.  By then they were all hot commodities and could place poems, reviews and stories in all of the top magazines.

In 1925 Harold Ross founded the New Yorker and brought Parker and Benchley on board as part of his Editorial Board.  Parker really came into her own.  Her poems became a favorite feature and she contributed sharp, well drawn short stories as well.  Her caustic book reviews as the Constant Reader were very popular.

In 1926 her first volume of poems, drawn from her contributions to the New Yorker, other popular magazines and the Conning Tower sold an amazing 47,000 copies and had generally glowing reviews.  She followed with two more collections, Sunset Gun in 1928 and Death and Taxes in 1931.

Despite her success, which included collaboratingon plays with Kaufmann and Elmer Rice, Parker’s personal life was a shambles.  Not only was she drinking heavily, but she was subject to bouts of black depressionand suicidal thoughts, which she sometimes hinted at in her poems.  Her marriage was on the rocks and she was engaged in a series of sad, sometimes disastrous love affairs.  Affairs with MacArthur, who would go on to marryactress Helen Hayes, Benchley, and Wolcott resulted in pregnancies and abortions.  After the first she made the first of several suicide attempts.

Her love life and disappointments became the fodder of her most famous short story, Big Blonde published in The Bookman magazine.  It won the prestigious O. Henry Award for Best Short Story of 1929.  She went on to publish several story collections over the next decade.

Parker’s life changed dramatically in 1927 as she became interested in the campaign to save anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti from executionon dubious murder/bank robbery charges in Massachusetts.  Previously largely apolitical, she traveled to Boston to protest and was arrested and fined $5 for picketing.  The experience set of a commitment to leftist causes, social justice, and civil rights that only grew and lasted the rest of her life.

By the early 1930’s the old gang at the Algonquin and newer members like Tallulah Bankhead and Edna Ferber were drifting apart.  The group dynamics of members sleeping with each other or occasional other’s spouses must have contributed.  But so did the increasing demands of successful careers and political tensions between the more conservative members and the increasingly radicalized Parker.

One day in 1932 Ferber showed up for lunch and found the regular table occupied by, “a party from Kansas.”  It was all over.

About that time Parker began a relationship with a fellow New Yorker contributor and sometimes actor Allan Campbell.  Like her, he was of Jewish and Scottish heritage.  He was also ten years younger and an active bi-sexual.  The two were married in 1934 in Taos, New Mexicoon the way to Hollywood and the lure of lucrative new careers as screenwriters.

They first caught on at Paramount.  He was put under a contract for $350 which included acting in bit parts, and she got $1000 a week.  They soon, however, established themselves as a successful screen writing duo earning $2,000 to $5,000 a week free lancing a quality studios like MGM and Warner Bros.  Most of the 15 films on which they collaboratedwere competent, journeyman efforts.  But they earned an Academy Award nomination for the classic A Star is Born in 1937 with Janet Gaynor and Fredrick March.  When Parker’s friend and fellow left wing activist Lillian Hellman was called away from The Little Foxes to work on another project, they were called in two write additional dialogue for the Bette Davis.

The marriage broke up in divorce in 1938 but despite Parkers drinking and suicidal depressions, they continued to work together until Campbell entered the service as a military intelligence officer in World War II.  As her contribution to the war effort, she worked with Wolcott and Viking Presson a compact edition of her best stories and poems for soldiers serving overseas. After the War Viking released it for American readers as The Compact Dorothy Parker.  It has never since gone out of print. 

But Parker’s days in Hollywood were number as the Red Scare infected the industry.  For years she had been a leader of anti-Fascist crusades and organizations.  She had even reported on the Spanish Civil War for The Masses and had helped re-locate defeated veterans of the war to safety in Mexico.  She was active on or chaired several committees—most notably the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League which grew to 4,000 members and was accused funneling large sums of money to the Communist Party.

Parker’s last Hollywood job was The Fan, and adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan for Otto Preminger in 1949.  After that she was hauled before a Congressional Committee, pled the Fifth Amendment, and blacklisted.

In the midst of all of that, Parker re-married Campbell in 1950.  They separated, but did not divorce, in 1952 and Parker returned to New York to take up residency in the Volney Hotel.  Advanced alcoholism prevented her from returning to regular magazine work, although she submitted occasional reviews.  Mostly she made a small living as celebrity guest or panelist on such radio programs as Information Please and Author, Author.  She wrote monologues for old friends Tallulah Bankhead and Ilka Chase.

Despite her drinking, she remained as active as possible politically.  She was especially moved by the Civil Rights Movement as it unfolded on the streets of the South.

In 1960 she reconciled with Campbell and moved back to Los Angeles where the couple worked fitfully on un-realized projects.  In 1962 Campbell committed suicide.  In worse emotional shape than ever, Parker returned to the lonely life of a Volney Hotel drunk.

When she died of a heart attack on June 7, 1967 Parker left her estate, including valuable literary properties, to Martin Luther King, Jr. to support him in his work.  When he was killed days later the estate ended up in the hands of the NAACP.

With no living relative or willing friend to claim them Parker’s ashes stayed in a file cabinet in her lawyer’s office for 17 years until the NAACP claimed them.  They buried them under a markeron the grounds of their Baltimore headquarters.  The plaque reads:

Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) humorist, writer, critic. Defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested, “Excuse my dust”. This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people. Dedicated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. October 28, 1988.

Here is just a sample of Dorothy Parker’s poetry—snide, sarcastic, and finally movingly personal.

A Pig’s Eye View of Literature

The Lives and Times of John Keats,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron

Byron and Shelley and Keats
Were a trio of Lyrical treats.
The forehead of Shelley was cluttered with curls,
And Keats never was a descendant of earls,
And Byron walked out with a number of girls,
But it didn't impair the poetical feats
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley and Keats.

–Dorothy Parker