The People Yes

I’ve been reading a biography of the celebrated American poet Carl Sandburg—winner of two Pulitzers for his verse and another for his biography of Abraham Lincoln.  I hadn’t realized that Sandburg was a committed Socialist, who stumped and campaigned tirelessly for the party in the presidential elections of 1908.

According to his biographer Penelope Niven, there were over 3,000 socialist organizations in the United States at that time.  The Communist Party wouldn’t be founded for another decade.  Instead, socialists comprised an enormous range of working Americans whose labor was undervalued by the system, from tenant farmers in Oklahoma to miners in the coal fields of Pennsylvania to sweatshop seamstresses in New York.

 

Sandburg was one of them, his father a Swedish immigrant who toiled ceaselessly and saved unsparingly but steadily lost ground—particularly after a home he purchased turned out to have a hidden lien, hitting him heavily with unexpected debt.

Before turning to poetry, his son Carl turned out political tracts hoping to convince readers that wealth and poverty were both social creations—neither the achievement of independent entrepreneurs nor shiftless shirkers but rather results of impersonal economic forces.  A series titled “Letters to Bill” that he wrote were epistles addressed to an imaginary manual laborer:

Do you see, Bill, how your interests and mine and everybody else’s are all tangled up and woven in with each other?  Do you see how society, all of us together, produced Rockefeller, Thaw, and the one-legged man on the corner selling pencils?  A modern locomotive of the latest model is said to represent ideas contributed by more than eleven thousand men …

Yet just a handful profited from owning the railroads, which ought to serve the interests of all.

Sandburg’s own convictions were expressed in the words of another fictional character he created, a white-haired old man in a country village:

I have been reading history and science for forty years and from all that I have studied as to how nations are born and grow and then die, it seems to me that just as soon as a nation gets to the point where a small part of the people are rich and a large part of the people are poor—then that nation is starting to die, the death of it is beginning.

What would Sandburg’s sentiments be today, when the gulf between rich and poor has reached an extreme not seen since the 1920s?  Sandburg never lost his faith in the capacity of the masses of people to eventually arise and organize on their own behalf, as expressed in his famous poem "The People, Yes!"

The people will live on.

The learning and blundering people will live on.

    They will be tricked and sold and again sold

And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,

    The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback …

Men like Sandburg make me think that socialism is just another word for democracy, which should include not only popular government, but an economy of the people, by the people, and for the people ... not for a monied few.  

I LIke To Think of Harriet Tubman

Two headlines in separate newspapers this morning juxtapose the political contradictions of our times.  In the New York Times, the headline announces “House Republican Pass Deep Cuts in Food Stamps.”  And in the Daily Tar Heel, the campus newspaper at the University of North Carolina, the front page leads with “Food Stamp Need Triples in County.”

The college paper reports on Sonya Dixon (a.ka. “Cookie”), who prepares and serves meals at a childcare center but whose own daughter has cerebral palsy, which means she can only work part time.  With limited earnings, she depends on food stamps to put meals on the table.  Sonya is African American and is one of 6, 357 others in Orange County who receive food stamps.  The unemployment among blacks in North Carolina is over 17%.  

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says the Republican backed measure in Washington would cut about four million recipients like Cookie from the rolls of those who receive help feeding their families.  Congressman Marlin Stutzman (R-Indiana) promises, “This bill eliminates loopholes, ensures work requirements, and puts us on a fiscally responsible path.”  Has the Congressman asked Sonya Dixon how she’s going to feed her disabled daughter? 

Here’s a poem by Susan Griffin titled “I like to think of Harriet Tubman,” which I dedicate to Mr. Stutzman and his colleagues in the House.

I like to think of Harriet Tubman.

Harriet Tubman who carried a revolver,

who had a scar on her head from a rock thrown

by a slave-master (because she

talked back) , and who

had a ransom on her head

of thousands of dollars and who

was never caught, and who

had no use for the law

who defied the law. I like

to think of her.

I like to think of her especially

when I think of the problem

of feeding children.

The legal answer

to the problem of feeding children

is ten free lunches every month,

being equal, in the child's real life,

to eating lunch every other day.

Monday but not Tuesday.

I like to think of the President

eating lunch on Monday, but not

Tuesday.

and when I think of the President

and the law, and the problem of

feeding children, I like to

think of Harriet Tubman

and her revolver.

And then sometimes

I think of the President

and other men,

men who practice the law,

who revere the law,

who make the law,

who enforce the law

who live behind

and operate through

and feed themselves

at the expense of

starving children

because of the law.

men who sit in paneled offices

and think about vacations

and tell women

whose care it is

to feed children

not to be hysterical

not to be hysterical as in the word

hysterikos, the greek for

womb suffering,

not to suffer in their

wombs,

not to care,

not to bother the men

because they want to think

of other things

and do not want

to take women seriously.

I want them to think about Harriet Tubman,

and remember,

remember she was beaten by a white man

and she lived

and she lived to redress her grievances,

and she lived in swamps

and wore the clothes of a man

bringing hundreds of fugitives from

slavery, and was never caught,

and led an army,

and won a battle,

and defied the laws

because the laws were wrong, I want men

to take us seriously.

I am tired wanting them to think

about right and wrong.

I want them to fear.

I want them to feel fear now I want them

to know

that there is always a time

there is always a time to make right

what is wrong,

there is always a time

for retribution

and that time

is beginning.

Justice in Black and White

The facts of what happened in Florida the night a pistol-packing wannabe-cop named George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager with no criminal record walking back to his Dad’s home after purchasing a candy bar, will never be known.  Trayvon is dead, and his version of events is lost forever.  But the jury’s decision to acquit Zimmerman of all criminal charges almost certainly reflects the fact that none of the jurors were black, and raises the question of whether an African American male can receive justice in a U.S. courtroom.

Trial by a jury of one’s peers is a deeply ingrained value in our country. But blacks and whites have such different experiences regarding the law, the police, the veracity of sworn testimony and the reliability of the criminal justice system that “peerage” (or an equivalence of attitude) is almost impossible between them.  The five white women and one Latina female who sat in judgment on George Zimmerman were probably not consciously biased.  But few non-blacks can fully understand the anger and dismay their verdict must arouse, recalling an era when the official legal doctrine (enunciated in the infamous Dred Scott decision) was that “no black man has any legal rights that a white man must respect,” and a centuries long southern tradition of all white juries acquitting lynch mobs.

Racism remains a virulent reality in our legal system, reflected at every level, from the profiling that occurs in routine traffic stops to differential rates in application of the death penalty.  Young African American men like Trayvon are particularly prone to these disparities, more likely as an age group to be incarcerated than to go to college, more likely to perish (like Trayvon) from a gunshot wound than from any other cause of death.

The majority of white folks in this country will be inclined to accept the outcome of the Zimmerman trial at face value, assuming the state failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.  Criticism of the prosecutor’s evidence and arguments can rightfully be made.  But for blacks, Trayvon will understandably be viewed as one more young man of color, gunned down without cause and without recourse to the law: not the aggressor in this case (as the defense alleged) but a victim, pure and simple.

With Trayvon gone, tragically, no one can say they are wrong.