#beverly gage

[living400lbs]

"In Montgomery, though, King takes second place to Rosa Parks, the quintessential local hero. In popular culture, she often appears as a resilient Everywoman who just decided one day that she was too tired, body and soul, to put up with injustice any longer. But as the historian Jeanne Theoharis has written, Parks was much more than that. By the time she said “no” that fateful day on the bus, she had already spent more than a decade involved in civil rights work, and she was well trained in nonviolent direct action. When she refused to give up her seat on December 1, 1955, Parks knew what she was doing."

- from This Land Is Your Land by Beverly Gage

[wellesleybooks]

The Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday, amazingly there were two novels chosen for the award for fiction.

Pulitzer Awards for Books, Drama and Music

Fiction

"Demon Copperhead," by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)

"Trust," by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead Books)

Finalist:

"The Immortal King Rao," by Vauhini Vara (W. W. Norton & Company)

Drama

"English," by Sanaz Toossi

Finalists:

"On Sugarland," by Aleshea Harris

"The Far Country," by Lloyd Suh

History

"Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power," by Jefferson Cowie (Basic Books)

Finalists:

"Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America," by Michael John Witgen (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press)

"Watergate: A New History," by Garrett M. Graff (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)

Biography

"G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century," by Beverly Gage (Viking)

Finalists:

"His Name is George Floyd," by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking)

"Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century," by Jennifer Homans (Random House)

Memoir or Autobiography

"Stay True," by Hua Hsu (Doubleday)

Finalists:

"Easy Beauty: A Memoir," by Chloé Cooper Jones (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)

"The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir," by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Doubleday)

Poetry

"Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020," by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Finalists:

"Blood Snow," by dg nanouk okpik (Wave Books)

"Still Life," by the late Jay Hopler (McSweeney’s)

General Nonfiction

"His Name is George Floyd," by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking)

Finalists:

"Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern," by Jing Tsu (Riverhead Books)

"Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction," by David George Haskell (Viking)

"Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation," by Linda Villarosa (Doubleday)

Music

"Omar," by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels

Finalists:

"Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)," by Tyshawn Sorey

"Perspective," by Jerrilynn Patton

[contemplatingoutlander]

Perspective | McCarthyism was never defeated. Trumpism won’t be either.

Censure brought down a crusading anti-communist senator but fired up his followers.

The author of this essay, historian Beverly Gage, makes a strong argument that McCarthyism continued to exist after McCarthy by morphing into right-wing institutions like the National Review and the John Birch Society. We certainly see echoes of his anti-communist message in the current GOP/ Trump propaganda that Joe Biden and Democrats are secret “socialists” with a “radical left” agenda.

Here are some excerpts from the essay:

“Though we now think of McCarthy as one of the most hated men in American politics, even in 1954 he retained a passionate base of support, with about a third of the public backing his anti-communist campaign. Once the Senate voted against him, the tale of how he had been victimized by a corrupt and self-interested Washington establishment helped fuel the far right’s grievance politics — and spark what would become the modern conservative movement. Far from bringing an end to McCarthyism, the 1954 Senate vote mainly pushed it out of Washington, and a new generation of right-wing activists took up his cause.

“Something similar is likely to happen as Trump departs the Oval Office warning of elite conspiracies and rigged ballots, encouraging his base to see themselves as noble warriors against an illegitimate political order. While the Trump presidency will soon be over, the history of Trumpism is just beginning. [....]

“After McCarthy’s censure, this tale — of a courageous warrior taken down by illegitimate foes — helped fuel a wave of institution-building on the right. In 1955, Buckley founded National Review magazine, a bid, as he described it, to break up the ‘identifiable team of Fabian operators’ who were “bent on controlling both our major political parties.” Three years later, candy manufacturer Robert Welch established the John Birch Society, a conspiratorial far-right organization that attracted millions of members with claims that even Eisenhower secretly sympathized with communism. The two camps never saw eye to eye, with Buckley sneering at the Birchers’ paranoid style. When it came to McCarthy, though, they shared a common view: Though Buckley expressed certain reservations about the senator’s methods, he agreed that McCarthy’s censure in 1954 revealed the workings of a corrupt, soft and traitorous political establishment. [....]

“On the right, though, the legend of his victimization lived on. As recently as 2003, conservative provocateur Ann Coulter (an on-again, off-again Trump ally) published the book “Treason,” arguing that McCarthy was right and his critics were not only wrong but, as the title suggests, traitorous. Trump himself was schooled at the knee of Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s infamous committee counsel, who long insisted that his good friend Joe had been the victim of an outrageous elite conspiracy.

“Trump’s story of what happened in the 2020 election bears all the hallmarks of McCarthyite myth: conspiring elites, hidden corruption, even the threat of an imminent socialist takeover. And though Trump will no doubt leave office on Jan. 20, that story — and the powerful sense of grievance behind it — is sure to thrive in the years ahead. Trump has all but vowed to run again in 2024. Even if he doesn’t, he will continue to sell the tale of his martyrdom through Twitter and cable news and talk radio and conspiracy sites — forms of direct public communication that McCarthy would have envied. After 1954, when media gatekeepers such as Edward R. Murrow turned against him, McCarthy was hard-pressed to find mainstream outlets willing to tell his side of the story. Trump now has an entire right-wing media universe at his disposal, while social media allows him to bypass the gatekeepers altogether.”

[emphasis added]

[edited]

[watchingalotofmovies]

MLK/FBI

MLK/FBI    [trailer]

Based on newly declassified files, a doc that explores the US government's surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr.

By now the events are familiar. But a reminder of the abuse of power by Hoover and the racist FBI is always instructive. Which felt save in the knowledge that the majority of the American people back then backed their action.

It struck me that King was only 39 when he was assassinated.

[living400lbs]

"At nineteen, I accepted uncritically the idea that the Mountain West, with its rodeos and vast open spaces and rugged lifestyle, was more truly American than, say, suburban Philadelphia. I didn’t realize then that I had been taken in by one of the greatest mythmaking machines in U.S. history."

- from This Land Is Your Land by Beverly Gage

[living400lbs]

"In 2025, for instance, under a presidential executive order, the National Park Service began posting notices that urge visitors to file complaints if they come across anything unduly “negative about either past or living Americans.”

As a J. Edgar Hoover biographer, I can say with some authority that it’s not a great sign when the government starts asking citizens to spy and report on each other, or to censor their history. It’s even worse when government officials suggest that things that actually happened—slavery, for instance—should not be discussed openly and honestly. The good news is that history is hard to suppress, once people know it’s out there. And there are still many people committed to getting American history right."

- from This Land Is Your Land by Beverly Gage

[living400lbs]

"George Pullman envisioned his town as a place of peace and harmony, where labor and capital would happily coexist. But even he knew this might be hard to realize. He decided to build his town after the Great Rail Strike of 1877, when about 100,000 workers walked off the job nationwide and returned only after soldiers and policemen forced them to. More than a hundred strikers died in clashes with the authorities, fueling calls for retribution and for coming back stronger the next time. That next time came all too quickly in Pullman’s view. On May 1, 1886, just two years after he completed his town, workers in a vast array of industries—steel, coal, rail, meatpacking—walked off the job in support of an eight-hour day.Newspapers dubbed it the Great Upheaval, predicting that class warfare—not industrial utopia—would define America’s future.

The possibility that such upheaval might result in some sort of workers’ revolution preoccupied nearly everyone in Gilded Age society. You wouldn’t know that from our historical landscape, though, which tends to ignore labor and working-class history. With the exception of slavery, we spend remarkably little time exploring the work that went into producing the country’s wealth. Even slavery is more often discussed as a form of racial oppression than as a grueling labor system. Despite its importance to almost any subject you can name—government, business, race, politics, gender, culture—the United States has no national museum devoted to labor or to the broader history of the American working class. There are precious few local museums either, and the ones that do exist often operate on shoestring budgets. Rather than confront and understand the widespread nature of class discontent, we mostly make do with plaques and markers devoted to moments of dramatic conflict or labor history heroes.

Chicago is an exception—in part because the history of the city is so inextricably bound up with the class politics of the Gilded Age. Even as Pullman dreamed of a pastoral town, devoid of conflict, Chicago’s workers were busy building their own visions of what America was supposed to be. In one popular conception, the Great Upheaval was just the latest variation on the American Revolution, a fight on behalf of democracy and equality and happiness, adjusted for the new industrial order."

- from This Land Is Your Land by Beverly Gage

[living400lbs]

FDR "signed the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act), guaranteeing a federal process for unionization. Under the law, workers in a variety of industries scrambled to create new labor unions. Many were affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, founded in 1935 to do for labor what Ford had done for auto production: organize it from top to bottom."

- from This Land Is Your Land by Beverly Gage