People Before Profit blog

"Gendering Radicalism" tells important story of women and communism

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 15:16:00 +0000

The history of American communism, while contested, is a central component of 20th-century U.S. history. Arguably, we cannot write about 20th-century U.S. history without writing about the Communist Party. Similarly, we cannot write about 20th-century California without writing about the California Communist Party - or the three generations of women leaders who led the California CP from its birth until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Beth Slutsky's new book Gendering Radicalism: Women and Communism in Twentieth-Century California does just that. By focusing on the lives of three remarkable women communists, their trials and tribulations, the victories and defeats, Slutsky places their lives squarely within the context of the times. She not only tells their story. She tells the party's story - as well as the story of the broader movements for social and economic justice, of which the party was a key component.

Slutsky first focuses on Charlotte Anita Whitney (1867-1955), a well-to-do suffragist, women's rights advocate, socialist and - eventually - founding member of the Communist Party USA.

In 1919, at the age of 52, just weeks after officially becoming a communist, Whitney was thrown in jail for advocating for racial equality, for "a square deal for Negroes by means of the orderly process of the law." Speaking out against racist violence, as seen through the "dramatic backdrop" of the first Red Scare in the years immediately following World War I translated into "teaching violence; advocating violence; justifying violence; committing violence; and organizing people to advocate, teach, aid, and abet criminal syndicalism."

As Slutsky put it, "Ironically, on the day Whitney spoke out against lynching...she herself was indicted for [allegedly] advocating violence against the government." After an immense, prolonged grassroots campaign for free speech, California's governor "bowed to pressure" and pardoned Whitney in the spring of 1927.

After her pardon Whitney continued as a leading communist. In 1934, at the age of sixty-nine, she ran for state treasurer on the Communist Party ticket, taking 100,820 votes, "more than double the number of votes of any other [Calif.] Communist Party member in that election." At this time the California CP had about 4000 dues-paying members, as well as tens of thousands of supporters, union and community allies, evidenced by Whitney's impressive electoral results.

The second woman communist Slutsky focuses on is Dorothy Ray Healey (1914-2006), who joined the Young Communist League in the late 1920s. Healey, an organizer with the party-led Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union, organized "several large strikes," primarily among Mexican and Mexican American lettuce workers.

During the spring of 1934, Healey - like her comrade Whitney 15 years earlier - confronted the prospect of prolonged jail time. As a union organizer and communist, she also knew that her strike activity placed her on the front lines of the class struggle. She received death threats, and "at one point learned of bounties placed on her head." Due to her leadership, in 1938 the party-led United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers' of America, the seventh-largest CIO affiliate, elected her to serve as international vice president.

According to Slutsky, the union "chose her based on her reputation [as a fearless organizer] but also because she was a woman. Thus, her gender became a strategy to organize the union in important ways," heretofore ignored by the lily-white, male-dominated, anti-communist AFL.

Further, Slutsky highlights the gendering of opportunity, as "The Party and the union...facilitated greater workplace and leadership opportunities for her.... Clearly, the political [CP] and union work provided Healey with opportunities for professional advancement that would have been nearly impossible to find elsewhere in the 1930s. At a time when most unions excluded female members and leaders and mainstream political parties reluctantly accepted token female representation, Healey embraced the professional feminist identity that labor [and party] activity afforded her."

By 1940, Healey had been appointed to serve as California's deputy labor commissioner, where "she held hearings on labor code violations and visited workplaces to inspect health and safety conditions."

As Slutsky writes, Healey's job as commissioner "made the ideals of the Popular Front come to life." Healey was undoubtedly fond of the job. She would later recall: "I was officially entrusted with the authority to enforce the state's quite progressive labor code. I was given a huge police badge, with the authority to arrest employers - they were the only people I could arrest."

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Healey was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, targeted and harassed. Later in life she continued to build broad-based labor-community alliances, and helped to mentor a new generation of party leaders who would emerge as the 1960s and '70s era's student-led, anti-war and civil rights movements became the focus of party work.

Healey would eventually leave the party in 1973, declaring: "My hatred of capitalism which degrades and debases all humans is as intense now as it was when I joined the Young Communist League in 1928. I remain a communist, as I have been all my life, albeit without a Party."

Before she left, however, Healey "won the admiration of the next generation of activists...[and] sought to identify with students who were coming of age through the free speech movement."

It was Healey who recruited Kendra Harris Alexander (1946-1993), the final woman communist leader discussed in Gendering Radicalism.

According to Slutsky, "Alexander represented a new generation of Communist Party members and leaders who came of age during the Cold War, became politicized by their participation in the civil rights movement, but then quickly moved on to the Communist Party."

Further, Alexander exemplified a "much different" CP, an organization "younger, representative of different class and educational levels, committed to multiple movements, and less obedient to the Soviet Union...."

As a CORE (Committee On Racial Equality) and W.E.B. Du Bois club member, Alexander fought against Jim Crow, lynch law, and for voter registration. By 1966 she had joined the CPUSA, and helped to bridge the student-based New Left and the working class, African American-based Old Left, which was primarily allied to the CPUSA. By the early 1970s Alexander would become the coordinator of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, her good friend and fellow communist, who had been imprisoned on trumped-up charges of murder.

Alexander would remain a party staple throughout California's left and progressive movements until spring 1992, when she left the party. Tragically, she would perish in a house fire just one year later.

Slutsky's Gendering Radicalism is a good read. Whitney, Healy and Alexander's stories deserve to be told and retold, as their stories are in many ways also the stories of the California Communist Party. By highlighting these courageous lives, Slutsky humanizes the party. She paints a nuanced picture of an organization and its individual members deeply rooted in the American radical tradition, warts and all.

University of Nebraska Press, 2015, 259 pages

Two kids reclaim the world in new opera “Second Nature”

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 12:52:00 +0000

CHICAGO - It is well known that science fiction can serve as a radical warning of things to come if society progresses on its present course, and as a mirror held up to our own civilization today.

Perhaps there ought to be more in this genre directed toward a children's audience, to pique their imaginations and steer them onto the road of reordering the planet, which desperately needs it.

Matthew Aucoin (oh-KOYN), 25, has written the music and words to a new opera just under an hour in length. Titled "Second Nature" and set in the year 2120, it had an attractive, professional world premiere in the beautiful early 20th-century conservatory-like second-floor open space above the Café Brauer at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo in two performances on August 19 and 20. We caught the second evening. Although written for young people's ears, the work is interesting and accessible to everyone. Happily there are several future performances scheduled.

Only 105 years from now, climate change has made most places on Earth unlivable. The few surviving humans have built a shelter they call the Habitat to protect them from the outside world. Everything inside their little bubble is a virtual or synthetic copy of what was once found in nature. The place they live in happens to be the remains of an old zoo - thus the appropriateness of the world premiere venue, although this coincidence should not be an impediment to later productions of the work.

Many years before, escaping the ravages of a despoiled world, the strong-willed Elder Constance (Leah Dexter) led Elizabeth (Julie Miller) and her son Jake (in this performance acted by James Onstad but sung from the pit by Brett Potts), and David (David Govertsen) and his daughter Lydia (Sylvia Szadovszki), to this isolated preserve, which they are forbidden ever to leave.

Enter the bonobo (also sung by David Govertsen), known among animal researchers as the friendliest, most cooperative and least belligerent member of the ape family. He becomes acquainted with the two children, Lydia, 12, and Jake, 10, and relates how the world once was. He even offers them a piece of unimaginably delicious fresh fruit from a tree that still grows outside the Habitat, and they start wondering what else might be out there.

The parents Elizabeth and David defy Elder Constance and let their kids go free, and Lydia and Jake start exploring their own "second nature."

As in the original Garden of Eden story, which surely everyone will have thought of already, it takes disobedience to become fully human, with the power to act morally, make decisions, love, labor, and yes, err as humans. What progress in the world has ever taken place without someone thinking, "There has to be a better way?"

Aucoin's opera has any number of additional historical and artistic references and resonances. At times it felt like a medieval morality play, or a fairy tale with maidens imprisoned in locked towers, and like a coming of age story for the survivalist epoch. Hansel and Gretel come to mind, as well as Brecht's teaching play "The Measures Taken" or Aaron Copland's school opera "The Second Hurricane." The composer is still quite young, but he has been absorbing all these influences since he was the age of these characters; he heard his own music performed by a local orchestra at the age of nine.

The principal drawback of the Café Brauer space was acoustic. The singers' voices rose like a sound cloud up to the high glass ceiling and failed to project out to the audience. There was no amplification, nor was the libretto provided. So truthfully much was lost; charitably one could say that even language itself had become victim of global destruction!

The colorful set was built by Means of Production; costumes by Uber Costume (Elder Constance's Disney witch-evoking gown was brilliant); and the fanciful wigs by Penny Lane Studios. It was all very eye-catching.

"Second Nature" is a project of Lyric Unlimited, Lyric Opera of Chicago's department dedicated to education, community engagement, and new artistic initiatives. Any major opera company has to be considering who will be the audiences of the future for its work.

Aucoin's scoring for piano, violin and clarinet was clear and efficient, in a modern esthetic that children will either find uncomfortable - if they've been listening to too many popular songs - or perhaps find entirely suitable for the story, without prejudgment. I hope the latter, and I'd like to believe it too, on the theory that young ears are not so preconditioned to "know" what opera is supposed to sound like. Some of the dialogue is on the "talky" side, but as the music unfolds we hear a well constructed trio and a final quintet of remarkable grace.

Another "Second Nature" performance is open to the public on Sat., Oct. 17, at 2 pm at Francis W. Parker School, 330 W. Webster, Chicago (entrance on Clark St.). Tickets may be reserved for that performance at www.lyricopera.org. Acoustics in standard auditorium spaces will no doubt be better.

"Second Nature" will also tour Chicago-area schools this fall with Lyric Unlimited's Opera In the Neighborhoods program.

The printed program for the opera is itself memorable and collectible, not only a cast list but a virtual little encyclopedia about opera and animal preservation, complete with games and study guides.

May "Second Nature" find a second production in another community soon. It's a remarkable work.

Sylvia Szadovszki as Lydia and David Govertsen as Bonobo.

Photo: Todd Rosenberg

Today in history: radical Dada artist Man Ray is born

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 11:47:00 +0000

On this date in 1890, Man Ray (né Emmanuel Radnitzky) was born in South Philadelphia, the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants. He wound up spending most of his career in France as a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements. He produced major works in a variety of media, including painting, but was best known for his photography, collages, assemblage, performance art, conceptual art, and "photograms," which he called "rayographs."

Around the turn of the 20th century, his family moved to the Williamsburgneighborhood of Brooklyn, and changed their surname to Ray in reaction to the prevalent anti-Semitism of the time.

Man Ray's father worked in a garment factory and ran a small tailoring business out of the family home, enlisting his children to assist him from an early age. Man Ray's mother enjoyed designing the family's clothes and inventing patchwork items from scraps of fabric. This family background left an enduring mark on his art. Mannequins, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, swatches of fabric, and other items related to tailoring appear in almost every medium of his work. Art historians have noted similarities between Ray's collage and painting techniques and styles used for tailoring.

As a youth Man Ray befriended the artist Marcel Duchamp, who was interested in showing movement in static paintings. Such movement is seen in the repetitive positions of the dancer's skirts in Man Ray's painting "The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows" (1916). He began to be exhibited in solo shows, and produced his first significant photographs in 1918.

Man Ray abandoned conventional painting to involve himself with Dada, a radical anti-art movement founded by young European artists profoundly disillusioned by society in the wake of the monstrous insanity of World War I. He started making objects and developed unique mechanical and photographic methods of making images. Like Duchamp, he did "readymades" - ordinary objects that are selected and modified. His "Gift" readymade (1921) is a flatiron with metal tacks attached to the bottom, and "Enigma of Isidore Ducasse" is an unseen object (a sewing machine) wrapped in cloth and tied with cord. Echoes of his childhood are readily apparent: It is fair to speculate about the sense of absurdity and futility he must have seen often in sweatshops and home-centered garment manufacture in New York City.

Man Ray teamed up with Duchamp to publish one issue of "New York Dada" in 1920, but for Man Ray, Dada's experimentation was no match for the wild and chaotic streets of New York. He wrote that "Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is dada, and will not tolerate a rival."

For much of the remainder of his life Man Ray repatriated himself to France, where he integrated himself into the boundary-pushing esthetics of cubism, surrealism, and constructivism. From Paris the influence of these movements spread worldwide, including to the young Soviet Union, where artists, architects, musicians and filmmakers enjoyed their freedom to explore new "machine art" techniques and principles.

In 1959 the critic Edouard Roditi cited the poem "Dada Slogans, Berlin, 1919":

DADA

stands on

the side of the revolutionary

Proletariat

open up at last

your head

Leave it free

for the

demands of our age

Down with art

Down with

bourgeois intellectualism

Art is dead

Long live

the machine art

of Tatlin

DADA

is the

voluntary destruction

of the

bourgeois world of ideas.

Man Ray died in 1976, and was buried at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.In 1999, ARTnews magazine named him one of the 25 most influential artists of the 20th century. In 2013, Man Ray's photograph Noire et Blanche (1926), depicting a Caucasian woman's face counterposed with a West African mask, was featured in the USPS Modern Art in America series of stamps.

Adapted from Jewish Currents "This Week in Jewish History," Wikipedia, and "Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics," by Herschel B. Chipp (University of California Press, 1968).

Racism as a pigment of your imagination: “Citizen: An American Lyric”

Wed, 26 Aug 2015 14:14:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - The cutting-edge new play Citizen: An American Lyric, with its ripped-from-the-headlines topicality, is, sadly, already in need of updating. Toward the end of this dramatized spoken word collage, based on Claudia Rankine's 2014 book of poetry of the same name, video images of blacks murdered by police and vigilantes - Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Emmet Till, and others - fill the wall behind the stage. Tragically, pictures of the latest victims apparently killed by cops for the most minor of traffic infractions - Sandra Bland and Samuel Dubose - do not, to the best of recollection, appear in this heartbreaking photo gallery.

This is not the fault of Rankine or of playwright Stephen Sachs, whose adroit adaptation of Rankine's prophetic poems for the stage is having its world premiere production at Los Angeles' Fountain Theatre. Rather, it is a testament to the terrible temper of the times that the outrageous misfortune of racism as perpetrated and perpetuated by domestic terrorists against unarmed "Africans in America" (as Stokely Carmichael called his people) is continuing at such head-spinning speed that poets and dramatists can't keep up.

Despite the sorrowful fact that the pace of our racist system's crimes against the humanity of black folk is faster than the literary/theatrical creative process, Rankine and her "amanuensis" (of sorts) Sachs have created a significant, substantial work that is must-see viewing (and listening) for today's theatergoers. As the emerging playwright Audra Bryant put it at the reception following Citizen's opening, this play is important because it is sparking discussions about race and racism in America. (Bryant's play The Cage premiered in 2011 at Hollywood's Stella Adler Theatre.)

Citizen's superb cast consists of three females and three males, four of whom are African American, while two appear to be white. The 75-minute or so one-acter is constructed of vignettes that depict interactions between blacks and whites and reveal the commonplace racism that is all too often just below the surface of ordinary people. For instance, at a school setting Citizen #5 (Lisa Pescia, who seems to be white and has appeared on TV shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm) can't curb her enthusiasm when she "compliments" Citizen #1 (the radiant Simone Messick, a black actress who is probably the play's standout performer), gushing, "Your [facial] features are more like a white person's."

In another sketch, Citizen #3 (Leith Burke, an African American actor who appeared on Broadway with Maximilian Schell in Judgment at Nuremberg and on TV's The West Wing) amusingly and insightfully enacts "How to become a successful black artist." Of course, this commercialized persona requires the requisite dose of rage in order to play the stereotypical "angry black man" (as if 400 years of oppression wouldn't enrage anyone!).

Particularly eye-opening for this reviewer were the scenes in which Citizen #2 (the talented Tina Lifford, Scandal, Winnie Mandela in Mandela and DeKlerk) portrays tennis champ Serena Williams.

Among other incidents, Tifford re-enacts Serena's contretemps with a line judge at the 2009 U.S. Open, which prompted the star athlete from Compton to exclaim: "I swear to God I'm going to take this ball and shove it down your f**king throat, you hear that? I swear to God." (This altercation is #1 on the London newspaper The Guardian's hit parade of "The Top 10 Tennis Tantrums...") Similar examples of what appears to be Serena's temperamental disposition are depicted by Tifford, whose muscles are tensed up and coiled with rage during these scenes.

According to Citizen, however, it's not just the competitive nature of sports - especially professional, high stakes athletics - alone that has fueled Serena's outbursts. The play raises the ugly specter of white judges, umpires, sportscasters (who delight in mocking her body type as "unfeminine"), etc., making racist calls against the straight-out-of-Compton Serena, who - along with her sister Venus - has dared invade the rarefied, lily white domain of hoity-toity tennis.

Since I can't stand athletic belligerency, competitiveness and misbehavior in general and tend to regard most pro athletes as overprivileged, spoiled jocks, I hadn't taken Citizen's racism allegations vis-à-vis Serena into consideration. But the play opened my eyes and mind.

Based on the poems of the Jamaica-born Rankine, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, PEN Open Book Award, NAACP Image Award and other accolades, Sachs (also this production's co-artistic director) has crafted a poetic dramatization. At first, the staccato bursts of Citizen's script, which swing from scene to scene (not unlike an avant garde film), bewildered this critic more used to plays with conventional narrative structures. But as Citizen moved along, I became accustomed to this different style of storytelling that is more lyrical and thematic than it is chronological. In that way, this work is nonlinear and more Brechtian, with a style and form more mosaic than prosaic.

Shirley Jo Finney's direction of Citizen does an admirable job of helping the play transcend linear structure and find alternative, creative ways to communicate its themes. Yee Eun Nam's video design enhances Citizen's expressiveness and poetic sensibility. For instance, Nam's visual FX assist in revealing the perils of driving-while-black in this land of white supremacy.

As Citizen #4, Bernard Addison - perhaps the most recognizable face on stage, with film and TV credits too numerous to list - excels in these scenes about innocent black drivers being rousted by the cops and going from being in the driver's seat to being at the wrong end of a billy club.

Citizen packs such a powerful punch that, as Audra Bryant pointed out, it stirs conversation about the (pick your color) elephant in the room, which Americans have often resisted discussing in private or as part of our tortured national discourse around race. Indeed, Bryant added, Citizen inspired her to go home and work on her own racially relevant play.

The innocent black victims of police or vigilante terror may often not get justice, but here, in the theater - if not "court" - of public opinion, these citizens find vindication by a jury of their peers in a peerless play. From ballads to the lyrical, along with poet Rankine and playwright Sachs, Finney is still giving voice to the anguish and hopes of Africans in America. And like Orson Welles' 1941 classic about capitalism, this Citizen raises Cain.

Citizen: An American Lyric is being performed through Sept. 14 at the Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Los Angeles 90029, on Saturdays and Mondays (dark Sept. 7) at 8 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. For more info: (323) 663-1525 or www.FountainTheatre.com.

Photo: Ed Krieger

"Fear the Walking Dead" brings zombies to the City of Angels

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 16:34:00 +0000

Less a spinoff and more a prequel, Fear the Walking Dead began its six-episode first season on Aug. 23. Securing a record-shattering 10.1 million viewers, the series premiere demonstrated the power of the franchise and will continue to prompt interest in U.S. audiences' ever growing enthusiasm for pandemics and the undead. Has the series matched up with the reputation established by its parent show? Not even close. But it could get there in time.

Fear takes us back several years, showing us the events that took place before the beginning of The Walking Dead, and which set the zombie apocalypse into motion. It's set in Los Angeles, providing a more urban backdrop as an interesting counterpoint to the other series' rural landscape. But rather than root itself in mystery and symbolism, like the main show, here the plot is straightforward -- to a fault, because it seems like an odd approach for a series that is supposed to be slowly unraveling the "beginning of the end," as it were, for the audience.

The episode begins with the first zombie already causing mayhem, with others appearing soon afterward as the people of L.A. begin to realize that some sort of virus is infecting people. One "walker" is only witnessed in a classroom, on smartphones, in the form of a YouTube video that went viral, and to the show's credit, this successfully taps into the very real way that news -- especially tragic events -- reach the eyes and ears of us millennials. But it seems that the writers are bull-headedly determined to push any and all unknown elements or subtleties out of the narrative, so that it almost feels like the main characters are experiencing this all vicariously. The writers trade what could have been a creepy slow burn for a mad dash to get us right into the thick of things.

And parallels drawn between one of this show's characters and The Walking Dead's Rick Grimes don't help the prequel to distinguish itself. Here, a drug addict wakes up to witness a walker feasting on an unwitting victim, while five seasons ago on the parent series, Rick awoke from a coma to see much the same thing, albeit on a grander scale.

That's only one of the problems. The other is that the characters, as of now, aren't all that interesting. The focus is on a family -- a mother, her boyfriend, the aforementioned addict (who is her son), and her daughter. Each character has a mildly interesting backstory that the episode spends way too much time focusing on, and the best character, boyfriend Travis (Cliff Curtis), gets much less screen time than the worst one -- son Nick (Frank Dillane). And yet, the roles seem well-acted; it's not the cast that leaves something to be desired, but rather, what the showrunners are willing -- or not willing -- to do with them. Still, this is the pilot, so judgment on that part of the show ought to be reserved for now.

Despite these shortcomings, it's the Walking Dead brand's signature stamp of gripping drama and scenes of gore and viscera that hold my interest right now. The guys behind the original show know how to craft their scenes, weaving elaborate tapestries of suspense and grit, and that's equally evident in the prequel. Other smaller scenes, like a troubled student's ominous advice ("there's safety in numbers") and a man getting sick in the hospital (it's insinuated that he's "turning," though never directly acknowledged), go a long way toward making things more compelling. It shows that less is more, and that credo, actually, is what the show needs to adopt going forward - both to differentiate itself from its series counterpart, and to build things up, thematically speaking, to a nerve-shattering crescendo.

Photo: "Fear the Walking Dead" Facebook page

Today in history: Musician/activist Leonard Bernstein is born

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 11:48:00 +0000

On August 25, 1918, Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Mass. He became the most prominent American-born conductor and a supremely talented musician, educator and composer.

Bernstein conducted virtually every leading orchestra in the world, made hundreds of recordings, and enjoyed a long tenure with the New York Philharmonic. For a time, his conducting career seemed compromised by his attraction to writing for the Broadway musical stage, which was considered not classy enough for élite symphonic audiences and corporate boards. But he pursued his dream of writing for popular audiences, and is remembered for such works as "On the Town," "Wonderful Town," "Candide," and his masterpiece, "West Side Story." He also wrote film scores, symphonies, choral works and chamber and solo compositions.

Only with the recent availability of Bernstein's FBI dossier, and with the 1997 opening of his archive at the Library of Congress, would it be possible to fully document his long history of political and social engagement. Up to this point, Bernstein's activism had been known piecemeal and anecdotally. New York magazine writer Tom Wolfe used the term "radical chic" in a 1970 article, later appearing in book form, that savagely satirized Bernstein for hosting a swank fundraiser at his home for the Black Panther Party, then under murderous government attack, suggesting that his values and the Panthers' were totally incongruous.

With the resources made newly available, political scientist Barry Seldes released his 2009 study "Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician" (University of California Press: Berkeley).

Upon graduation from Harvard in 1939, Bernstein immediately fell in with older composers who became his mentors, men such as Marc Blitzstein, Aaron Copland, Elie Siegmeister, and Earl Robinson, all of whom were either Communists or close to the party. The FBI started tracking Bernstein.

Earlier biographies tended to minimize Bernstein's politics, but Seldes shows how his social outlook fundamentally informs many of his key works. Seldes uncovered every FBI attempt to pinpoint Bernstein's Communist affiliations. It started when an informant told the FBI that Bernstein "was the director of the local communist John Reed Society" while at Harvard in the late 1930s, and continued for much of the composer's life, from his support for Spanish Civil War refugees, for Ben Davis for New York City Council in 1945, for radical composer Hanns Eisler, for the Progressive Party and the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948, and a constellation of "people's" organizations with self-evident proximity to the Communist Party.

In the end the FBI could apparently never finger Bernstein as a party member, much as it would have relished confirming the hearsay, and Seldes accepts that indeed he had not been. But even if never a member, it is obvious that a handsome, brilliant, articulate artist like Bernstein was helpful to a broad range of important left causes for over a decade.

Bernstein's 1952 one-act opera "Trouble in Tahiti," still staged here and there, is a tragicomic reflection on consumerism, alienation and U.S. militarism right at the peak of the Korean War.

As the object of increasing surveillance, Bernstein was listed prominently in the anti-Communist organs Red Channels and Counterattack. It ended with an affidavit that he signed on August 3, 1953, affirming that he had not been a Communist, only a naïf who lent nominal support to a variety of front groups throughout the 1940s. From there his career resumed and flowered.

Seldes is especially insightful in his cultural exploration of the Bernstein "rehabilitation": In his analysis the neoliberal cultural Cold Warriors allied with the CIA and the State Department won this particular battle against the domestic McCarthyite witchhunters in the FBI and HUAC. The turnaround was a testament to the subtly shifting dynamics of Cold War politics in the mid-1950s, influenced by the powerful commercial interests of the "celebrity machine," the CBS media empire and the New York Philharmonic.

Bernstein used his fame and the end of the blacklist to spring back into political life from the Kennedy presidency on. In 1965 he marched for civil rights in Alabama with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and became a fervent peacenik during the Vietnam War, prominently supporting the Gene McCarthy presidential bid. He was a close personal friend of Father Philip Berrigan of the draft records-destroying Catonsville 9, and relied on his advice for the controversial "Mass" he premiered in Washington's new Kennedy Center. And Bernstein took a great deal of political heat for the Black Panthers benefit. In 1979 he signed a protest petition along with other American intellectuals against continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

Bernstein died 25 years ago, on October 14, 1990. His brother Burton, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, wrote of him, "Just as long as people care a damn about something finer in life than power and money and their imagined superiority over others there will always be Lenny around to educate, entertain, edify, move and inspire - to change us all in some wonderful, subtle way."

Adapted from the author's "Leonard Bernstein's Radical Politics," Jewish Currents, Winter 2009-2010.

Photo: New York magazine photograph of Leonard Bernstein, his wife Felicia Montealegre and Don Cox, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party in the Bernsteins' apartment in Manhattan, January 14, 1970. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” is electrifying

Fri, 21 Aug 2015 13:27:00 +0000

An American Big Bang burst forth 400 years ago. The selling into slavery of West African human beings was the cataclysmic 17th-century eruption that gave rise to our country's diseased myths about race. Necrotic archetypes careening out of this disastrous maelstrom of human misery have lodged themselves deep within our nation's consciousness.

In his new book, "Between the World and Me," Ta-Nehesi Coates, national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, uses the literary conceit of a letter to his pre-adolescent son to write a masterwork on the real life-and-death challenges of being black in modern-day America. The result: One of the great writers of our time commits to taking ownership of his personalized narrative on race, a quest that, as the reader discovers, is subject to continuing revision.

In interviews, Coates has revealed that after completing the provocative and controversial cover story "The Case for Reparations" for the Atlantic's June 2014 issue, an assiduously researched treatise, he began to yearn for a more immediate, emotionally based project. A year later, Mr. Coates' "Between the World and Me" vibrates with electrifying primal feeling, buttressed by the workings of an always searching, transcendent intellect operating at full throttle.

Fear is a main character in his journey, viscerally injecting itself into his internal experience, just as it infects the goings-on in the world outside, a dangerous universe seething with tormenting contradictions. Those expecting to find a hopeful father-to-son saga of ultimate victory and redemption will not have their wish granted. But so dense with the deepest of psychic insights are these pages, one is beseeched to reread the author's words again and again in order to wring out as much of their meaning as possible - a far greater reward indeed.

Coates grew up on Baltimore's west side, a working-class district with a predominantly African American population. His father, a research librarian and a founding member of the city's Black Panther Party, metes out strict and often physical discipline to his growing son. Ta-Nehisi explains to his son a likely reason for his grandfather's frightening approach: "Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made."

Is the parent's hand that strikes his son's body in the grip of the fearsome echoes of the past, raining down blows in hopes of protecting his son from what looms in his future? Some readers may recall a scene in Baltimore during the recent civil unrest following the brutal murder of Freddie Gray at the hands of the city's police: An angry (or panic stricken?) mother was filmed landing a haymaker on her adolescent son's head as she chased the boy away from the dangers of the street, illustrating perhaps the extreme reactivity arising under duress from a parent's abject terror for her child. What is abundantly clear is that existing in a permanent and historic state of siege exacts an incalculable toll on humanity.

A sixth-grade moment in time, just after school, is jarringly etched as Coates sees a boy pull a gun on a "boy, who was standing next to me." The boy with the gun does not pull the trigger and is quickly spirited away from the terrifying scene by his cronies, but in the slow motion blink of an eye it is brought home just how vulnerable Ta-Nehisi's eleven-year-old body is to the randomness of the violence in his environment.

"I remember," he writes, "being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon." Over time, the rolling thunder of the ever-present danger of Coates' West Baltimore heightened his senses to such a degree that he could all but smell the air of the springtime "killing season" in his neighborhood.

When Ta-Nehisi enters Howard University, a central thematic construct presents itself: It's the search for a deeper understanding of himself and of his place in the inspiring cosmopolitan social order of a major black university. Also suddenly present is the epiphany that visits the young freshman who is living away from home for the first time -- "the pursuit of knowing," the seeds of which were instilled in him during childhood by both of his parents, which now represents a heretofore unknown freedom. Revealed to him is "the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books," and the delicious realization that that freedom was his for the taking.

As he finds himself catapulted into this heady evolutionary stage, he declares, "The classroom" is "a jail of other people's interests." To his great delight the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, the library where Ta-Nehesi's father spent his professional life, contains one of the largest collections of Africana in the world!

The "dream" is the vehicle by which Coates details his analysis of our nation's cancerous structural racism. He explains that "race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming the 'people' has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy."

Individuals at the top of this hierarchy, those identifying themselves as a part of white society, he explains, cannot exist in their superior socio-economic role without the counterweight of black people occupying their place at the bottom - victims to be blamed, limited, abused and/or killed for being who and where they are.

"Between the World and Me" occupies the most rarefied of places. In its 152 pages lie deep revolutionary truth, sensitivity and mastery.

Between the World and Me

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (July 14, 2015)

Available in hardcover (176 pages) and Kindle editions.

Photo: Ta-Nehisi Coates by Eduardo Montes-Bradley. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Commons.

“When Government Helped”: Comparing FDR and Obama

Fri, 21 Aug 2015 12:52:00 +0000

"When Government Helped" brings together a number of essays that contrast President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal" Great Depression policies with those of President Obama as he tries to cope with the present Great Recession. It's profoundly thought provoking.

Just reading the notes at the end of every chapter is an education. The writers' research is deep and wide.

I couldn't stop talking about this book all the time I was reading it, and can't stop talking about it now. Like a lot of people, I've heard different assessments of the "New Deal" all my life. Some say it ended the Depression, some say it was totally ineffective and that only the coming of World War II stopped the economic crisis. Some say that some of the alphabet soup of New Deal programs (such as WPA, the Works Progress Administration) should have been extended through the war and should be still in effect today. This would certainly be true of the New Deal's environmental efforts. Until I read this book, I didn't even know enough to form an opinion.

Of the many theses proved in this scholarly work, the greatest kills off Ronald Reagan's argument that "government is not the solution, it is the problem." In both periods considered, Great Depression and Great Recession, government had to step in decisively to save capitalism from itself. More to the point, government had to rescue the victims of capitalism.

Of the two presidents considered, Obama comes off the less effective. The editors particularly underline the difference between the current "top down" approach of saving the banks first and the "bottom up" New Deal approach of providing meaningful jobs for the unemployed. Of course, the editors note the great differences between the situations faced by FDR and Barack Obama. FDR's Democratic Party usually had strong majorities in Congress and these were boosted, in many cases, by powerful social movements. Neither president is treated in the book as a saint or savior, but both are evaluated as politicians confronted with great economic crises.

On looking back through this excellent book, I wonder that it never mentions one of the greatest differences between what Obama faced and what FDR faced: the existence and nonexistence of the Soviet Union. Roosevelt could argue against his capitalist detractors that socialism was urgent and imminent in the physical presence of the Soviets, while President Obama didn't have such a convenient bogeyman when big money criticized his efforts.

"When Government Helped" should be read and treasured. It's the reader that gets the help now.

"When Government Helped"
Sheila D Collins and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, eds.
2013, Oxford University Press, 360 pages, paperback or ebook

"Who is Gil Scott-Heron?" is tribute to late poet-musician

Fri, 21 Aug 2015 11:02:00 +0000

A new film is being screened in select cities this summer that focuses on the life of the late poet-musician, Gil Scott-Heron. The title of the film is Who Is Gil Scott-Heron? This legendary African-American recording artist and author made quite an impact on many lives, and this is the main theme of the film. This feature is not a strict documentary, but rather a heartfelt tribute to the man by many of the folks who were affected by his generosity and inspiration.

The film is directed by BAFTA nominated filmmakers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. The filmmakers make it clear their goal was not to make a movie specifically about the artist's recording career. Instead, it's a portrait seen through the eyes of those who loved Scott-Heron, his friends, his family, and the musicians he played with. Recorded interviews in the United States and United Kingdom are interspersed with images of the musician performing and also spending time on the streets of New York City.

The musical clips are incredibly poignant and powerful. A shining example is the song "I'm New Here" from his 2010 album of the same name. The lyrics in this song, "No matter how far wrong you've gone, you can always turn around" show the humanity in his art. The artist is also seen performing and discussing his 1974 album Winter in America. This musical study on social, political, and economic issues is considered one of his greatest works. Musically, however, the footage takes a back seat to the interviews. His inspirational performances within will only whet the viewer's appetite. Scott-Heron faced many challenges in his life, including legal and health issues. Still, he always strived to make a positive difference either socially or personally in other people's lives.

The voices in the interview segments are numerous, but Scott-Heron's son, Rumal Rackley, shines with some loving reflections on his father. Mr. Rackley states that many admirers painted his father as a talented musician, poet and early rap artist. In his son's eyes, Scott-Heron was foremost a world class wordsmith. He explains that his father gave the gift of words to people like no other.

We also learn in this film that the poet's grandmother was a huge inspiration, and passed along the philosophy that "If you could help someone in life, why wouldn't you?" Scott-Heron carried this philosophy all through his years as witnessed by the commentary of his fellow musicians and friends in this film.

Viewers who have little or no knowledge of his career will come away from this film with the desire for more. Who Is Gil Scott-Heron? does not attempt to provide a definite biography of the artist. Many aspects and details of this social poet's life are left unanswered as the intent is to focus on his impact on others. There is very little archival footage or early timeline in this film. The directors instead focused on immediate close-ups of his friends and peers as they sincerely, and emotionally, recall their time shared with him.

Scott-Heron was born April 1, 1949 in Chicago. He attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a school which was also the choice of Langston Hughes, the writer who most influenced the young Scott-Heron. He arrived on the scene in the turbulent late 1960s as a visionary musician and poet. His classic 1970 album, Small Talk at 125^th and Lenox produced the striking spoken word track, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." This track reflected his views of the inner city struggle and the indifference of the corporate controlled media. A subject that is still as relevant as ever in the 21st century. A re-recorded version of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" with a full band, was included on his classic 1971 album, Pieces of a Man.

Scott-Heron left us much too soon. He passed away on May 27, 2011 at the age of 62. His legacy of social concern and musical genius will carry on. As viewers continue to attend screenings of Who is Gil Scott-Heron? throughout the year, they should keep in mind this film is basically a loving testimony from the folks who were close to him. It does not provide all the answers that a straight documentary would attempt. What this film does do, however, is showcase how one human being, through art and compassion, can make a difference in so many lives.

Who is Gil Scott-Heron? has a running time of only 60 minutes and stays focused on its goal of presenting the artist's impact. Everyone attending the theatrical screenings will receive a free download card to go on the XL Recordings website and download Scott-Heron's last record, Nothing New, for free.

"Who is Gil Scott-Heron?"

Directed by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard

Documentary, 2015, 60 min.

Photo: Wikipedia (CC)

“Ricki and the Flash”: blinded by the light

Thu, 20 Aug 2015 11:12:00 +0000

She is the best actress of our generation, perhaps of any generation. She has won three Academy Awards and eight Golden Globes, among her iconic performances. She is beautiful, charming, funny and can sing, as she well proved in Postcards From the Edge.

But even the best of us make bad choices. Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman made Ishtar. Liz Taylor made Cleopatra. Even now talented young actors Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan are stuck in The Fantastic Four.

Ricki and the Flash was a bad choice. Perhaps it looked good in the green light. The team's talent went beyond Streep. Academy Award winner Jonathan Demme had directed Stop Making Sense, arguably the finest concert film ever made. Diablo Cody had also won an Academy Award for the bittersweet comedy Juno. Add to that Oscar winner Kevin Kline, musician Rick Springfield and a host of competent character actors. It must have seemed like a sure winner.

But the writing was clumsy and tone deaf. The set pieces could be seen from miles away, coming apart as they were dragged across the Sony back lot. Given his great range, Kline might have been plausible, given some smart dialogue, instead of that coat hanger stuck in the back of his shirt.

Worst of all, Streep was not within sight of believable. It was like someone playing a role, not Meryl Streep creating a character. It was saddening and maddening watching her try to lift the movie up to some meaning, trying to make us believe in Ricki. Could she have actually just walked out on her family for that slender a career? Could her re-tread rock and roll greatest hits of someone else have actually inspired such a scattered frenzy of bar concert patrons? Does Tarzana only have that one bar, The Salt Well, that Ricki seemed to play in perpetuity?

The cast tried so hard. But the jokes were tortured. The warmth didn't reach room temperature. You could hear the empty bucket hitting the bottom of the emotional well. Bright spot Mami Gummer, Streep's real life daughter, commanded empathy. But that might have only been by contrast with other characters. The few effective scenes drifted by like wreckage offering to save the audience from drowning if they could just be reached.

By Hollywood fiat, the movie ties up all loose ends. Putative dramatic tensions are resolved. Actors are coupled or cured. Streep's straight son Joshua (Sebastian Stan) marries; her gay son Adam (Nick Westrate) finds a partner; her daughter Mamie Gummer may even be cured of her depression. Streep and her ex-husband Kevin Kline's newer wife bury the hatchet, unfortunately not in each other. The film doesn't so much build to these conclusions, as lurch toward them, though you knew they were coming right from the beginning.

In the end, it turns out that all anyone needed was right in front of them and could be cured by a mother's love. Unfortunately, it takes just a bit more to make a good movie!

"Ricki and the Flash"

Directed by Jonathan Demme

2015, PG-13, 101 min.

This article was reposted from Huffington Post.

Photo: Meryl Streep in Ricki and the Flash (RickiandtheFlashMovie.com)

Beyond this door is another dimension: capitalism’s "Patterns" of (mis)behavior

Fri, 14 Aug 2015 13:52:00 +0000

Numerous critics and commentators have observed that with the advent of shows such as Mad Men television has entered a second "Golden Age." It's appropriate that Beverly Hills' Theatre 40 has launched its diamond jubilee season with a blast from the past, harkening back to the tube's first Golden Age. Part of what made this early period of the new medium shine so brightly was that teleplays were presented on live TV on programs such as Playhouse 90 and Kraft Theatre, which broadcast Patterns on Jan. 12 and Feb. 9, 1955 (with some different cast members).

Patterns was written for the little screen by one of television's titans, the late, great Rod Serling, who won the first of his six Emmys for this drama. This top talent was so gifted and renowned that he was one of TV and cinema's rare writers and/or directors to become a brand name for those out there in TV-land. Like Alfred Hitchcock, Serling hosted and introduced his most celebrated series, The Twilight Zone. This offbeat anthology program with sci-fi and supernatural twists ran from 1959-1964, while the highly regarded Serling's fantasy-horror series Night Gallery aired from 1969-1973. Serling introduced Twilight Zone episodes with these memorable words:

"You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into The Twilight Zone." (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzlG28B-R8Y.)

Other highlights include Serling's script for Playhouse 90's Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956) starring Jack Palance, Keenan Wynn, Ed Wynn and Kim Hunter. The socially conscious, versatile Serling also wrote feature films, such as the intense 1964 drama about an attempted military coup d'état in the USA, Seven Days in May, and Planet of the Apes (1968), co-written by Michael Wilson, one of the blacklisted Hollywood reds.

This is a good place to return to Patterns, which - like Mad Men - is an incisive critique of corporate capitalism with a tinge of the social awareness of proletarian theatre. In the Theatre 40 production of James Reach's theatrical adaptation of Serling's original teleplay, Daniel Kaemon (who was also fine in a Group Rep Theatre version of Awake and Sing! by that Depression-era apostle of proletarian theatre, Clifford Odets) portrays Fred Staples. This relatively young man (portrayed by Richard Kiley in 1955) has been recruited by Mr. Ramsey (Richard Hoyt Miller depicts the capitalist pig with snide panache) from a much smaller city and relocated to the big time in New York, where he is a rising star in the corporate suites at the Manhattan-based firm of Ramsey and Co.

Staples is confronted by ethical dilemmas that involve his older co-worker, Andy Sloane (James Schendel), whom Schendel portrays as a kind of Willy Loman-type character who was at the firm when old man Ramsey started it, helped build it up, but now, in his sixties, has seen better days. When Staples realizes why the bottom line, profit-driven Ramsey (the younger) hired him he must make moral decisions. His attractive young wife, Fran (Savannah Shoenecker) serves as a distraction from his scruples, trying to lure him to do what is best for his career - and hence her standard of living - even if it should haunt his conscience. As played by the alluring Shoenecker, Fran is essentially a pre-feminist unemployed woman (her job, such as it is, is being Fred's wife) using her wiles to remain in the bright lights of the big city, so the couple never has to return to Podunkville, USA.

Although they roughly depict similar eras in the Manhattan milieu of business, there are big differences between Matt Weiner's Mad Men and Serling's Patterns. Originating in a far more repressive time with stricter censorship of TV, Patterns is sexually neutered in comparison to the hanky-panky of Don Draper and company. Produced 60 years ago, Patterns presumably couldn't explore the sexual frisson between the nubile Fran and her husband's boss or between the secretaries and the executives.

So, for 2015 audiences, Patterns may feel dated and the production, directed by the award-winning Jules Aaron, is a bit stagey. Jeff Rack's set design, however, is a little unusual in that it seems to have a two-tiered structure that reflects the drama's underlying class struggle. Michele Young's costumes evoke the period dress and there's some good music and sound effects conjured up by sound designer Joseph Slawinski.

While Serling critiqued capitalism, as the denouement of Patterns reveals, it was not a revolutionary drama a la Bertolt Brecht. But it is still well-acted and, of course, well-written, and an enjoyable vehicle for aficionados of solid theatre. Theatre 40 is a worthy venue, which last season presented plays such as Hellman v. McCarthy, and, over all, Patterns is an appropriate choice for it to kick off its 60^th season.

Now, here are the fun facts of the day: Before their hit TV sitcoms Bewitched and Maude, Elizabeth Montgomery and Bea Arthur appeared in 1955 versions of Patterns and Richard Kiley went on to win a Tony for Man of La Mancha. Happy 60^th birthday Theatre 40!

Patterns is being performed Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00 p.m., Sundays at 2:00 p.m. through Aug. 23 in Theatre 40 in the Reuben Cordova Theatre, 241 S. Moreno Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90212. This is on the campus of Beverly Hills High School; there is free parking in a garage beneath the theatre (follow the "Event" signs). For info: (310)364-0535; www.theatre40.org.

Photo: Elain Rinehart and Richard Hoyt Miller.

Today in history: Fidel turns 89, poem by Che

Thu, 13 Aug 2015 11:18:00 +0000

Song to Fidel

You said the sun would rise.
Let's go

along those unmapped paths

to free the green alligator you love.

And let's go obliterating

insults with our

brows swept with dark insurgent stars.

We shall have victory or shoot past death.

At the first shot the whole jungle

will awake with fresh amazement and

there and then serene company

we'll be at your side.

When your voice quarters the four winds

reforma agraria, justice, bread, freedom,

we'll be there with identical accents

at your side.

And when the clean operation against the tyrant

ends at the end of the day

there and then set for the final battle

we'll be at your side.

And when the wild beast licks his wounded side

where the dart of Cuba hits him

we'll be at your side

with proud hearts.

Don't ever think our integrity can be sapped

by those decorated fleas hopping with gifts

we want their rifles, their bullets and a rock

nothing else.

And if iron stands in our way

we ask for a sheet of Cuban tears

to cover our guerrillas bones

on the journey to American history.

Nothing more.

From The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse, 1970. Originally published in Our Word, translated by Edward Dorn and Gordon Brotherston (Cape Goliard Press)

Photo: artist unknown, taken from a 1967 Christmas card

“The End of American Labor Unions” examines roots of anti-unionism

Wed, 12 Aug 2015 16:12:00 +0000

In March, Wisconsin became the 25th so-called 'Right-to-Work' state in our country. Coupled with anti-union RTW victories in Michigan and Indiana in 2012 and in Oklahoma in 2001, it seems as if right-wing, anti-worker interests are on the offensive. It had been over twenty years since RTW had scored a state legislative victory, as in Texas - in 1993.

Raymond L. Hogler's The End Of Labor Unions: The Right-to-Work Movement and the Erosion of Collective Bargaining is an important contribution to our understanding of the historical roots of so-called 'Right-to-Work,' its basis in libertarian ideas of individual freedom, and possible strategies organized labor should consider - if it hopes to survive.

Early on Hogler provides political context for differing perspectives on freedom and liberty and how these ideas intersect to shape our understanding of unions. He writes, "Because the problem of right to work rests on the incompatibility of radical individualism and collective security, the skirmishes between supporters and opponents of right to work in the United States are continuing proxy battles in the quest for control over our narrative of freedom, liberty, property, and community."

Further, Hogler tells us that our foundational definitions of freedom and liberty stem from two very different and unique understandings. Freedom was meant to signify community and brotherhood, while liberty - "in contrast" - signified individualism, personal preference and "an absence of servitude." And it is from these foundational definitions that the narratives surrounding "union security," or the closed shop, unfold.

Early in our nation and labor movement's history, judges, politicians and business owners utilized a "conspiracy doctrine [which] governed American labor relations..." and "hamstrung the activities of American trade unions for more than a century."

For example, "In the opening phase of conspiracy prosecutions, prosecutors described trade unionism as an illegitimate form of government that tried to usurp the authority of the state, and, as a result of labor's collective power, members of the community suffered economic injury from the actions of a narrowly self-interested faction."

According to judges, politicians and business owners, the injury was two-fold. "The first injury was higher prices resulting from the labor monopoly, thereby constituting the 'unlawful end' of a conspiracy to raise wages." The second injury - and here is the ideological basis or today's RTW campaigns - "arose from the harm to a non-conforming employee who was prevented from working on terms other than those acceptable to the group," hence the attack on union security clauses, or the closed shop - whereby as a condition of employment all workers pays dues or a representation fee for the cost of bargaining contracts, handling grievances, etc.

Hogler then highlights a number of so-called conspiracy cases in Philadelphia, New York and Pittsburgh, before transitioning into the emergence of the National Labor Recovery Act, the National Labor Relations Board and changes to national labor law born out of the Taft-Harley.

Interestingly, we learn that unions themselves and Robert Wagner - the primary architect of the NLRA and the NLRB, or Wagner Act - were partially responsible for the ambiguous language regarding closed shop provisions.

For example, Wagner justifiably feared the emergence of company unions with a monopoly on worker representation in certain industries, as employer rushed to form their own, acceptable, internal 'unions,' welfare associations or athletic clubs. Additionally, the AFL was known for lily white, segregated unions and many labor leaders feared security clauses, or the closed shop, would force them to represent African Americans, immigrants and women, which they were then loath to do.

Further, Wagner had little reason to expect the emergence of so-called states' rights initiatives whereby right-wing lawmakers and their corporate backers would utilize the state legislative process to undermine federal labor law, as - at this time, 1935 - the law was very explicit regarding labor and interstate commerce. Including provisions in the Wagner Act precluding states from in-acting RTW laws would have been "redundant, because states at the time lacked the power to legislate against closed shops."

Hogler then shifts gear and talks about the disastrous impact of Taft-Hartley, 1960's and 70's era fight-back within labor and the emergence of Regan and the radical right, as well as more recent court decisions pertaining to mandatory dues deductions.

The final chapter deals with the strategic shortcomings of recent AFL-CIO efforts to pass national labor law reform, like the Employee Free Choice Act and possible strategies for winning local 'just cause' laws, which would help unions reclaim the narrative around freedom and liberty.

The End Of American Labor Unions is a good little book, packed with insight and analysis. My only mild criticisms are that Hogler did not provide enough political context for the emergence of 1930's labor law reform and the Wagner Act, a significant victory born of hard struggle, coalition building, grassroots organizing and a vibrant left - like the Communist Party. Similarly, he doesn't provide context for the emergence of Taft-Hartley and the rightward drift of our nation, as the 'Red Scare' and the 'Cold War' unfolded against the domestic champions of workers' rights and democracy.

Minus these mild shortcomings, The End Of American Labor Unions is very much worth the read.

Dr. Raymond L. Hogler is Professor of Labor Law, Labor Relations and Human Resource Management at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. He is active in the Association of American University Professors (AAUP) and has served for a number of years as Vice-President for Legislative Affairs of the Colorado AAUP chapter. Among his accomplishments was drafting a bill passed by the Colorado Legislature in 2012 to allow non-tenure track faculty to enter into binding contracts for a period of years.

The End Of American Labor Unions: The Right-to-Work Movement and the Erosion of Collective Bargaining

By Raymond L. Hogler

Praeger / ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2015, 192 pages

Hardcover and Kindle editions

Marlon rides again: Hey Brando!

Tue, 11 Aug 2015 13:42:00 +0000

Marlon Brando may have died in 2004 but he has not gone gently into Dylan Thomas' good night. He's back!

In the interests of full disclosure your humble scribe should let you know that Brando is his favorite actor. Having said that, Stevan Riley's great new documentary Listen to Me Marlon, about the stage and screen legend, is a must-see for viewers interested in film/theater history, the art of acting, celebrity activism and, of course, Brando, the man and artist.

Riley had access to a hitherto previously unknown, privately held treasure trove of audiotapes the prolific Brando accumulated over the years for various purposes, including to prepare and research roles; self-hypnosis; recitations of Shakespeare monologues; etc. In these wide-ranging ruminations, Brando reflects on growing up miserable in Nebraska, the son of alcoholics; method acting; his family; many of his movies; his romantic life; and his activist radical politics.

Riley's doc explores and expresses the actor's inner and outer life through the audiotapes, spoken by Brando himself with that distinctive voice - in effect Brando is posthumously narrating the film, literally having the last word. Of course, there are extensive still photos and clips - not only from Marlon's movies but also of his Stanislavsky system guru, Stella Adler. Some of those who worked with Brando, such as Bernardo Bertolucci, who directed Last Tango in Paris (1972), also are heard.

In archival and news footage we see Brando's battles in court - briefly with his ex-wife Anna Kashfi and their custody clash over son Christian Brando and then, unfolding like a Shakespearean tragedy, what Brando called "the messenger of misery" arriving at his home: Christian's shooting of his Tahitian half-sister Cheyenne's Polynesian lover, Dag Drollet, at Marlon's Mulholland Drive perch.

There are also home movies of Brando in happier days at Tahiti and Tetiaroa, the nearby atoll that the reclusive star bought as a private getaway. Although the documentary, which is generally sympathetic to its subject (perhaps a condition of having access to the tapes and for making the film?), doesn't go into it, the killing of Dag apparently prevented Brando for the last 15 years or so of his life from returning to French Polynesia, where he would have been under French jurisdiction and subject to questioning. By building a resort at Tetiaroa the oft-contradictory celebrity brought tourists to his supposed refuge. And Brando's eco-obsession to transform Tetiaroa into an environmental paragon failed, marring the previously pristine paradise with abandoned rotting structures. (I know - I saw them there in the 1990s.)

Intriguingly, Riley includes a high tech version of the actor who played Kryptonian scientist Jor-El in Superman (1978). According to press notes, "Marlon Brando had his face digitized in the 1980s by VFX supremo Scott Billups using cutting edge software of the time called Cyberware... Passion Pictures put their best animation team on the job and under Stevan [Riley's] guidance, they used the original files and brand new techniques and software to create a stylized animated version 3D head. The technique effectively maps facial movements, so that the face directly corresponds to some carefully chosen sequences of Marlon's personal audio archive."

Among the most absorbing of Marlon's musings are his political views. The doc shows that this son of alcoholics and an abusive father developed an inherent sense of identification with outsiders and that the man who would play a Mafia chieftain in 1972's The Godfather maintained he couldn't stand to see the weak get pushed around. To his credit, in his finest moments Brando used his fame and fortune to support and shine a light on the oppressed. In Listen the actor/activist is seen in clips at civil rights events and at the funeral of "Lil' Bobby" Hutton, the teenage Black Panther killed by Oakland police in a shootout which involved Eldridge Cleaver. Brando is shown standing beside Panther co-founder and chairman Bobby Seale. Martin Luther King also appears in a different clip.

Brando is better known for his stance on Native American issues, although he once rather pithily pointed out that when it comes to who's more oppressed - blacks, Indians, etc. - "it's not an ouch contest." Brando is heard recounting putting himself "on the line" during an armed land struggle at Kenosha, Wisconsin, pitting Natives against National Guardsmen, discussing being "four feet from death" as bullets whistled near him.

Of course, in what is arguably the Academy Awards ceremony's greatest political moment, Brando sent traditionally-garbed Sacheen Littlefeather to decline his Godfather Oscar, due to Hollywood's disparaging treatment of America's aboriginal people with decades of celluloid stereotypes. Part of this unforgettable moment, which raised the spirits of indigenous occupiers at Wounded Knee and finally gave some airtime to Native Americans, is in Listen. (The doc fails to mention that ironically, the Italian Civil Rights League - which may well have been a Mafia front - criticized Brando, a non-Italian, for maligning the image of Italians and Italian-Americans in The Godfather.)

Intercut with clips from movies such as John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), Listen includes a bearded Brando denouncing Tinseltown's depiction of Natives as "savages" during a 1970s appearance on Dick Cavett's ABC-TV talk show, proclaiming: "Everything we are taught about the American Indian [by Hollywood] is wrong. There have been 400 treaties written by the United States, in good faith with the Indians, and every single one of them has been broken. We like to see ourselves as perhaps John Wayne sees us, that we are a country that stands for freedom, for rightness, for justice. It just simply doesn't apply. And we were the most rapacious, aggressive, destructive, torturing, monstrous people who swept from one coast to the other, murdering and causing mayhem among the Indians." When a member of Cavett's audience applauds Brando's challenge to American exceptionalism, he quips there was one Indian in the studio and adds: "But that isn't revealed because we don't like that image of ourselves."

In what appears to be an aside extracted from Brando's tapes he goes on to ponder: "We're all living on stolen land." However, Brando himself was the white American proprietor of a Polynesian atoll that had been the preserve of Tahitian royalty - although, to be fair, ownership of Tetiaroa (where there is now a large resort called "The Brando") appears to have been passed down to his Tahitian family. In any case, perhaps due to fears about possible deportation, the outspoken pro-Indian activist rarely, if ever, spoke up against French colonialism in Polynesia and France's nuclear testing at another atoll, Moruora.

Be that as it may, Listen is a stellar, riveting biography. What Brando aficionados may most appreciate is Marlon's mulling over of acting and his stage and screen career. It's fascinating to hear Brando reveal what he thought about in order to unleash his pent-up explosive rage in A Streetcar Named Desire, which catapulted him to fame on Broadway and then Hollywood, with Elia Kazan's 1951 big screen adaptation. It is an illuminating example of how the Stanislavsky method works.

Interestingly, Kazan, the director who is considered to have played such an influential role in shaping Brando's theater and movie career, is almost completely nonexistent in Listen. Perhaps this is part of the price the late Kazan is continuing to pay for being what Victor Navasky (in his book Naming Names) called "the quintessential informer" during the Hollywood Blacklist? In any case, the doc neglects to mention that On the Waterfront (1954), for which Brando won his first Academy Award, was a propagandistic apologia for snitching on La-La-Land leftists to the House Un-American Activities Committee, made by Kazan and fellow "friendly witness" screenwriter Budd Schulberg.

Brando's stardom brought a fame and idolatry that, he says, discomforted and discombobulated him offstage and offscreen. In Listen he expresses self-loathing for stooping so low as to be in what he regarded as his worst flick, Candy (1968), made during a lengthy nadir in his career. Brando often derided the acting profession - but listen, Marlon, if your dad abused you and repeatedly called you worthless, it doesn't matter if you make millions, become famous, win Oscars, sleep with endless groupies: One is still likely to feel like a zero. However, in what may be the documentary's most rewarding moment, Brando has what may be an epiphany as he discusses how worthy his avocation can be.

My favorite moments in Listen to Me Marlon resonate personally: Shots of his daughter Cheyenne Brando when she was a little girl. In 1976 my Tahitian vahine, Mareva Salmon, was farewelling me at Faaa Airport when she told me: "Adi - you look. It is Tarita." Mareva's mom, Ruita Salmon, had appeared with Tarita in 1962's Mutiny on the Bounty. Tarita was waiting with Brando's go-to guy in Tahiti, Dick Johnson, and several children bearing more leis than I had ever seen. Among the youngsters was adorable blonde haired Cheyenne, daughter of Tarita and Marlon.

They were waiting at the airport to welcome Dad back from the Philippines, where he had been shooting Apocalypse Now. I greeted Johnson, whom I'd previously met, and was introduced to Tarita, who was still radiantly beautiful. As is the French custom, it was Tahitian-style to kiss strangers on both cheeks but I went straight for the luscious lips of the co-star of Mutiny on the Bounty. Alas, Tarita was too swift and literally turned the other cheek.

It turned out that due to Apocalypse's overruns, Brando was a no show, and in those days before email, placing a phone call from the Philippines to Tahiti was difficult. I remember that holding her leis charming little Cheyenne seemed disappointed: 19 years later, after her boyfriend Dag's death, she met her own apocalyptic fate, hanging herself in Tahiti.

So I never met my favorite actor. But I did get to kiss Tarita - on the cheek. And you should go see this compelling film.

L.A.-based reviewer Ed Rampell co-authored "The Hawaii Movie and Television Book" (see: HYPERLINK "http://hawaiimtvbook.weebly.com/" http://hawaiimtvbook.weebly.com/) and his Progressive Magazine interview with America's former Poet Laureate is in the new book "Conversations With W.S. Merwin."

Listen to Me Marlon

2015 95 min

Director: Stevan Riley

Writers: Stevan Riley, Peter Ettedgui (co writer)

Stars: Marlon Brando

“The End of the Tour” is more snore than tour

Mon, 10 Aug 2015 15:06:00 +0000

I enjoyed the first hour of James Ponsoldt's The End of the Tour, which consists mostly of two 30-something men talking to each other. As an author, interviewer and journalist I was interested in the real life premise: In 1996, staff writer David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) convinces his Rolling Stone editor (Ron Livingston in a cameo) to dispatch him from Manhattan to the Midwest to cover, all expenses paid, the latest literary phenom, David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), and his book tour promoting the tome Infinite Jest.

As in Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre (1981), Tour's pair of writers are, of course, full of words. The repartee between the reporter and novelist is initially entertaining and engaging. Discourses on the literary life and creative process absorb me, and the actors, especially Segel, do creditable jobs.

Lipsky arguably breaks journalistic standards by accepting Wallace's hospitality and moves in with him, although there's a motel nearby at this rural Illinois outpost. Lipsky is likely too close to his subject to remain objective, balanced and fair. He also does some pretty sneaky things behind the author's back. For instance, in what may be another breach of journalistic ethics, the unsuccessful novelist-turned-reporter takes advantage of Wallace's generously offering him a roof over his head by snooping in his host's medicine cabinet to see what kind of prescription drugs Wallace is taking. (Reportedly, Wallace was on anti-depressants.)

After what seems like a few days the not-so-dynamic duo fly to Minneapolis for the film's titular tour. Joan Cusack is her quirky self as Patty, the author's escort who shepherds the literati around town when they are in the Twin Cities' vicinity. One of Cusack's cracks is among the film's best lines. Although Cusack's role is too small it was good to see a screen depiction of minders - interesting characters working in an overlooked avocation. I once had a minder when I was on a book tour in Hawaii who was such a malihini (newcomer) that she had no idea how to get around the islands, so I had to give her directions everywhere we went to sign books.

Anyway, after Wallace's tour is over he and Lipsky return to the middle of nowhere in Illinois. It's downhill from here, devolving into a blabfest that does not really capture one's attention. Their male egos begin to clash - Lipsky, who has published a minor novel, is envious of Wallace's fame and success after his Infinite Jest hits the bestseller list. They compete over women, and so on.

Nothing much really happens - no wonder Rolling Stone decided not to publish an article based on Lipsky's dull misadventures in the Midwest after spending a wad of Jann Wenner's loot. (Lipsky ain't exactly a Hunter S. Thompson - or Matt Taibbi, for that matter.) The magazine was clearly exercising better journalistic judgment in the 1990s than it has in more recent times, caught up in scandals and lawsuits as it is now over allegedly bogus reporting about gang rape on a college campus.

Lipsky did, however, keep his extensive audiotapes, which he turned into a 2010 book after Wallace's demise at the age of only 46. Did Lipsky cash in on Wallace and attain a measure of the fame and fortune he envied the Infinite Jest author for having? Although given Wallace's ending, recognition and money don't necessarily the happy one maketh and aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Eisenberg is pretentiously cerebral as he also was playing the socially inept Mark Zuckerberg, who because he could only relate to humans virtually supposedly invented Facebook in The Social Network (2010). I've never been a fan of Segel's buffoonish sexual loser shtick in flicks like This is Forty (2012) and 2008's Forgetting Sarah Marshall (which at least had the virtue of being shot in Hawaii). Seriously, has anyone ever seen Segel in a room with Seth Rogen at the same time? Having said that, in Tour Segel probably delivers his best performance to date and he is a dead ringer for the misbegotten Wallace at a certain period of his all too short life.

The film could have used more of the idiosyncratic Cusack to jazz it up. Ponsoldt's 2013 coming-of-age drama The Spectacular Now was better than this snoozefest that screenwriter Donald Margulies based on Lipsky's tell-all. Really, whose idea was it to film a blabfest about a guy purportedly on anti-depressants? This movie barely moved, feeling more infinite than jest. Although the first sixty minutes or so of The End of the Tour was good, after 106 minutes, when the curtain fell, I felt as if it was the end of the snore.

L.A.-based reviewer Ed Rampell co-authored "The Hawaii Movie and Television Book" and his Progressive Magazine interview with America's former Poet Laureate is in the new book "Conversations With W.S. Merwin."

Today in history: Uncle Ruthie Buell born 85 years ago, still performing

Fri, 07 Aug 2015 11:19:00 +0000

Tomorrow, Aug. 8, marks the 85th birthday of an extraordinary performing artist who is still very much among us and active as a singer, writer, songwriter, recording artist, radio producer and teacher both of music and in the field of special education. For many years she has worked primarily with blind children.

Ruthie has been a poet since age eight. She began her radio career in Chicago at age 12, and has been on the air as a radio producer with KPFK in Los Angeles since its beginning 55 years ago. She produces the nationally renowned "Halfway Down the Stairs," her multi-cultural, nonsexist program of stories, songs and poetry for listeners of all ages.

In 1996 Uncle Ruthie received the Rotary International Peace Ambassador Award, followed by the Children's Music Network Magic Penny Award in 2010. In 2011 her latest two-CD album, "The Jacaranda Tree," won second place in the Parents' Choice Awards.

Ruthie has recorded six albums, including the very adult "The Mystery of Time" and "Hanukkah at Home" for Rounder Records. She is a former long distance runner.

Uncle Ruthie is a proud member of the Communist Party. She performed in February for the People's World fundraiser in Los Angeles that featured PW's labor editor John Wojcik as keynote speaker.

She is particularly pleased with the "Poet Tree" she maintains in her front yard, a Chinese elm, in a contemplative courtyard adjacent to the sidewalk, on which she both posts poetry and invites passersby to post. Last year columnist Steve Lopez wrote up the Poet Tree in the Los Angeles Times.

To celebrate her 85th birthday, Uncle Ruthie is giving a concert with many invited guest artists, on Sunday, Aug. 9 at 7:30 pm at Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice, Calif. Guest artists include Luis Rodriguez, Austin Straus, Tracy Newman, Ross Altman, Dan Crow, Fred Sokolow, Lynn Shipley, J.P. Nightingale, and Jawanza Dumisani. General admission is $10; students and seniors, $6. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Why "Uncle" Ruthie, you might ask. The early days of radio programming for children were populated by announcers with names like "Uncle Bob" and "Uncle Fred," so she decided on a whim for one program to identify herself as "Uncle Ruthie," and the name has stuck for half a century!

Here is one of Ruthie's poems from her book "Come to My Voice," which comes with a CD of her reading all the poems so that her blind students and friends can enjoy:

Every Little Once in a While

"Bring a little water, Sylvie, bring a little water now,

Bring a little water, Sylvie, every little once in a while!" (old slave song)

Linda, tall

with powerful legs,

Linda, beautiful

and black,

Linda, who brings the mail

sits sobbing

on my front porch,

on the hottest day of summer.

"You say you're a poet," she says,

"Put this in one of your poems -

On my route

there's this really old lady -

lives on the second floor,

her mailbox is on the street floor,

she can hardly walk.

So for five years

I been delivering her mail

upstairs, to her door.

Today, when I get up there

it's so hot,

I ask for a glass of water.

She looks at me -

looks at me funny,

says, just a minute.

I can hear the water

running in the kitchen

She comes back

with a saucepan,

my water

in that saucepan

'Here,' she says.

I don't take it.

I don't take it - I don't drink it.

I don't say anything.

I go back downstairs.

I finish that street

and I maintain

till I hit your porch.

Girl, get me some water."

I go inside,

grab my grandmother's best crystal glass,

fill it with ice water

and carry it to Linda.

Still sobbing,

she drinks the water down.

"Think you can put this

in one of your poems?"

I tell her, "No, too hard.

who would believe it?"

"Bring a little water, Sylvie, bring a little water now,

Bring a little water, Sylvie, every little once in a while, every little once in a while!"

"Bring Me Little Water Sylvie" in a magnificent version by the all-women's a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock can be heard and viewed here.

Source: "Come to My Voice," by Uncle Ruthie Buell.

Today in history: Jazz artist Ramsey Lewis premieres new concerto at 80

Thu, 06 Aug 2015 11:11:00 +0000

Ramsey Lewis, iconic leader in the contemporary jazz movement for 60 years, was born on May 27, 1935. A happy belated 80th birthday!

Part of the milestone celebration this year, on Saturday, August 8, will be the world premiere of his Concerto for Jazz Trio and Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, with Scott Hall conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. As the composer, Ramsey Lewis will be on piano, with Ramsey Lewis & Friends and the James Memorial Church Sanctuary Choir under William Kilgore, minister of music. Lewis has a long-established relationship with Ravinia: Since 1992 he has served as artistic director for its jazz series, he was elected a trustee in 2002, and lifetime trustee in 2010.

One of the nations' top jazz pianists, Lewis has a distinct sound and and outgoing personality that have allowed him to cross over to the pop and R&B charts. His trio has undergone numerous personnel shifts over the years. At one point he hired a new rhythm section with Cleveland Eaton on bass and Maurice White on drums. When White left the band to form Earth, Wind & Fire, Morris Jennings signed on as the trio's new percussionist. White returned to produce Lewis' smash album "Sun Goddess," in which Lewis first experimented with electronic keyboards and featured Earth, Wind & Fire.

As an NEA Jazz Master, Lewis has also joined forces with countless other artists to create innovative music. In 1984 he collaborated with Nancy Wilson on "The Two of Us"; in 1988 he recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra for the album "A Classic Encounter"; and in 1989, Lewis and Dr. Billy Taylor cut a set of piano duets in "We Meet Again." Other collaborators have included Grover Washington, Jr., Earl Klugh, and Dave Koz.

Lewis has recorded more than 80 albums to date, beginning with "Ramsey Lewis and the Gentlemen of Swing" in 1956, and has racked up an impressive catalogue of compositions. His "Proclamation of Hope," commissioned by Ravinia Festival to celebrate Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday, premiered in 2009, and he wrote a dance score for the Joffrey Ballet in 2007.

Ramsey Lewis is a familiar on-air personality with long-running radio shows on WNUA in Chicago, and a nationwide syndication. He hosted an hour-long national PBS special entitled "The Jazz Masters" in 2005, and a weekly one-hour interview and performance program on "Jazz Central" for B.E.T. (Black Entertainment Television).

He has lectured and taught courses at several universities, and has won dozens of awards and honorary degrees. His jazz single "The In Crowd" (1965) was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Other Grammy Awards winner of his include "Hold It Right There" (19660 and "Hang on Sloopy" (1973). He has issued seven Gold Records, including "Wade in the Water" album/single (1966) and "Sun Goddess" (1976).

Additional distinctions have been his White House Performance at a state dinner President Bill Clinton held for President and Mrs. Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil in 1995, and carrying the Winter 2002 Olympic Torch for the Ravinia segment during its journey to Salt Lake City.

Improvisation is of course, central to jazz. "I've learned the hard way to give the orchestra signposts as I'm improvising," he told Opera News magazine regarding his upcoming premiere in Chicago, "so they can count off, so the conductor can count the bars that I'm improvising, and it's up to me to make sure than my improvisation stays in that amount of bars, so then when we get to letter B, which is the end of my solo, and he gives the downstroke to the orchestra, we're all in accord."

See Ramsey Lewis and his trio playing "The In Crowd" here.

Adapted from Opera News (July 2015), http://www.ramseylewis.com, and Wikipedia.

Photo: Wikipedia (CC)

Today in history: Actor-activist Martin Sheen celebrates his 75th birthday

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 11:23:00 +0000

On this date in 1940, Ramón Antonio Gerardo Estévez, better known by his stage name Martin Sheen, was born in Dayton, Ohio, of immigrant parents from Spain and Ireland.

Sheen has appeared in films since 1967, starring roles on long-running television series, and provided narration for dozens of documentary films. His fame derives almost as much for his social activism as for his acting.

The films Badlands (1973) and Apocalypse Now (1979) brought him a large audience. Other notable films include Gettysburg (1993), The Departed (2006), and The Amazing Spider-Man (2012).

Presidential and political roles have long studded Sheen's career: John F. Kennedy in the miniseries Kennedy - The Presidential Years; Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in the TV special The Missiles of October; White House Chief of Staff A.J. McInnerney in The American President; White House Counsel John Dean in the mini-series Blind Ambition; the President in the Lori Loughlin-Chris Noth mini-series Medusa's Child; and most famously, fictional Democratic president Josiah "Jed" Bartlet in the acclaimed 1999-2006 television drama, The West Wing.

Sheen has won film festival awards, Golden Globe and two Screen Actors Guild awards, and an Emmy, and been nominated dozens of times. Although known as an actor, he also has directed one film, Cadence (1990), appearing alongside sons Charlie and Ramón. He has been married to Jnet Templeton since 1961; they are the parents of four children (Emilio, Ramón, Carlos/aka Charlie, and Renée), all of whom are actors, as is his younger brother Joe Estevez. He adopted the stage name Martin Sheen to help him gain acting parts.

Sheen moved to New York City in his early twenties, spending two years in the Living Theatre company. In New York he met the legendary radical Catholic activist Dorothy Day. Working with her Catholic Worker movement, he began his commitment to social justice. Years later he would play Peter Maurin, cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement, in Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story.

In 1974, Sheen received an Emmy Award nomination for Best Actor in a television drama for his portrayal of Pvt. Eddie Slovik in "The Execution of Private Slovik." Based on an incident that occurred during World War II, it told the story of the only U.S. soldier to be executed for desertion since the American Civil War.

The committed social activist

In 2010, speaking to 18,000 young student activists, Martin Sheen explained, "While acting is what I do for a living, activism is what I do to stay alive."

Much of Sheen's activism derives from his strong religious and moral understanding. Aside from the Catholic Workers, he also credits the Marianists as an influence, as well as South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Though personally opposed to abortion, he does not oppose a woman's decisions. He is consistently pro-life also against the death penalty and war.

Among his many causes is opposition to U.S. military actions. In early 2003 Sheen signed the "Not in My Name" declaration opposing the invasion of Iraq, which appeared in The Nation. On August 28, 2005, he visited anti-Iraq War activist Cindy Sheehan at "Camp Casey," adjacent to President Bush's Texas ranch. Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, had been demanding a meetingwith the president. Sheen prayed with her and spoke to her supporters. He began his remarks by stating, "At least you've got the acting president of the United States," referring to his role on "The West Wing." Sheen is an honorary trustee of the Dayton International Peace Museum.

He supported the 1965 farm worker movement with César Chávez in Delano, Calif., and opposed a hazardous-waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio. Other labor, immigrant rights and environmental concerns have been high on Sheen's agenda as well.

In 2004 Sheen campaigned for Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, and later campaigned for nominee John Kerry. In 2008, after initially backing New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, he supported Barack Obama.

In 2000, Sheen got involved in support of gun control after the National Shooting Sports Foundation hired his politically conservative brother, actor Joe Estevez, who sounds like Sheen, to do a voiceover for a pro-gunmaker commercial earlier in the year.

In March 2012, Sheen played attorney Theodore Olson in a performance of Dustin Lance Black's play, titled 8, a staged reenactment of the federal trial that overturned California's Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage that was later broadcast on YouTube to raise money for the American Foundation for Equal Rights.

In a speech at Oxford University in 2009, Sheen admitted to having been arrested 66 times for protesting and acts of civil disobedience. He was described by one fellow activist as having "a rap sheet almost as long as his list of film credits."

Adapted from Wikipedia and other sources. Our PW writer Ed Rampell published "An Interview with Martin Sheen" in The Progressive in June 2015.

Photo: Sheen at an anti-war protest in 2007. | Wikipedia (CC)