Transcendentalism, Henry David Thoreau - book - 1864 - The Maine Woods

The Maine Woods
Henry David Thoreau
Quality Paperback Book Club
1864 (1994)
423 pages

The Maine Woods is an account of a trip taken in the Summer of 1846 by Henry David Thoreau, the great Transcendentalist philosopher, through Maine to the Mount Katahdin. The book, published after Thoreau’s death (like most of his writing), primarily gives the details of the plant and animal life of the wilderness he crosses by foot or by canoe. The descriptions of these natural features, I would say, make up most of the book and demonstrate a very focused attention on the natural world.  This particular edition of the book also includes lengthy appendices that list the life Thoreau encountered.  

Aside from noting all of the different forms of plant and animal life, The Maine Woods is filled with Thoreau’s musings on human activities in its interaction with nature, focusing both on American development and treatment of the land, and on the Indian interactions with the land.  A particularly noteworthy passage was where Thoreau lamented the killing of a moose by a white hunter, just for fun.  Thoreau was very critical of such activity which is, in essence, cowardly, stupid, and wasteful. He was also critical of some Indian (to use Thoreau’s term) practices as well, noting that they could be equally wasteful of natural resources at times, although he certainly also showed a great respect for Indian culture and the final section of the book is a list of words from the languages of the American northeast, and their English translations.

white power skinheads - book - 2002 - A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America

A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America
Elinor Langer
Metropolitan Books
2003
398 pages

In the fall of 1988, in Portland Oregon, an Ethiopian student and taxi driver named Mulugeta Seraw was murdered by a group of White Power skinheads who called themselves East Side White Pride. Portland has been, since the mid-1980s, one of the centres of youth-driven radical white suprematism, as groups like the Northwest Hammerskins and other skinhead groups have emerged out of Portland’s eclectic underground culture.

The Pacific Northwest has been designated as a Homeland for White Americans by various segments of the White Power scene since The Order  (also known as “The Silent Brotherhood) emerged as a Neo Nazi paramilitary vanguard, operating out of rural Washington, in the early 1980s.  More recently, the former American Nazi Party leader and current founder of the secessionist Northwest Front, Harold Covington, has been pushing this idea of the Northwest as a locale for white settlement which he calls the Northwest American Republic. I’m not sure where this vision leaves the various Indigenous groups who, at the very least, have given the Northwest so many of its place names.  

A seal of the Northwest Front which covers Oregon, Washington, and Idaho states. The now largely inactive Aryan Nations (thanks to a crushing multi-million dollar lawsuit launched by the Southern Poverty Law Center) was based in rural Idaho.

In the 1980s the Neo-Nazi Skins were seen as a new vanguard for the White Power movement.  In the American context, the skinhead emerged from the hardcore punk subculture, and while the skinhead look was adopted by a variety of different ideologies, it became very popular among young white fascists (who would declare that their skin is their uniform) and thus this connection between the skinhead look and contemporary Nazism, also took hold in the popular imagination.  Other kinds of skins, like the SHARPs (an acronym standing for “Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice”) were rarely represented in popular media, which reduced a complex subculture to a single malignant manifestation. Jack Moore’s 1993 text Skinheads Shaved For Battle, for example, acknowledged Anti-Racist skins but merely as street-fighting opponents to his primary topic, the Nazi skins.

At the heart of the over-representation of Skinheads of the Nazi variety were two media forces, the rise of daytime talk shows like Oprah, Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo, and others, which, according to Joshua Gamson’s 1998 book Freaks Talk Back, were significant because provided a forum for voices often marginalized by most other forms of media.  The other force in media was Tom Metzger, a former Grand Dragon of the California KKK and electronics technician and entrepreneur who hosted a monthly public access television program called Race and Reason which was distributed to various audiences via VHS tape.  It should be noted that an appearance of Metzger and his son on Geraldo, where a violent melee resulted in the host’s broken nose in 1989, remains one of the most referenced moments in both studies of White Power subcultures and histories of Talk television.  During the 1980s Metzger was also the figurehead of a white power organization called WAR (or White Aryan Resistance) that recruited Skinheads and encouraged violent confrontation with non-whites as a matter of duty.  

A Hundred Little Hitlers is The Nation journalist Elinor Langer’s account of the story of Seraw’s murder and its aftermath. Her primary achievement with this text is to take the material for what could be an especially lurid true crime book and humanize all of the agents involved. Langer, of course, creates a powerfully sympathetic portrait of the victim of this particular episode of xenophobic rage, but she also adds colour to her renderings of the perpetrators as well.  She does not invite the reader to feel for the members of East Side White Pride, but she does strive to represent them as not strictly hammer-fisted thugs, rather as people who have struggled through fractured lives towards the situation that led them to their doom (Seraw murderer Ken Mieske, or ‘Ken Death’ - a name relating to his status as frontman for a death metal band rather than his willingness to kill - died in prison last summer).  She notes that many of the skinhead neo-nazis were street kids who admired Hitler’s virulent racism and his impoverished adolescence. When Langer discusses the (ultimately successful) civil suit launched by Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Centre against Tom Metzger, she is critical of Metzger’s racist venom AND some of Dees more underhanded legal tactics.

 

Langer is a Portland resident (at the time of her book’s publication) and her text reflects that. The author frequently inserts references to her own situation into her narrative of these events, noting, for example, the proximity of her home to that of the family of one of the Neo-Nazi murderers. Langer’s book is an examination of all of the lines of social force an event such as a hate-murder produces, from the impact upon Seraw’s family at home in Ethiopia, to the multitude of effects at its Portland epicentre including upon the author, a neighbor to the crime.

Mulugeta Seraw

organized labour - book - 1931 - Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence In America

Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America
Louis Adamic
Peter Smith
1931 (Revised Edition - 1963)
495 pages

Louis Adamic, the author of Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, was not an academically trained historian.  He was rather one of the working class intellectuals that Antonio Gramsci theorized in his essay The Formation of the Intellectuals published in the Selections from the Prison Notebooks.  That is, an individual who emerged from his or her specific form of class consciousness to act as philosopher from their social situation.  Adamic was, as a young man, an unemployed and unskilled worker, a member of the radical Industrial Workers of the World, the international radical labour union, to become a speaker and historian of that movement.  He lacked formal education but possessed a will to compile the history of a movement that, in his time, no academic historian was likely to produce. That is, the history of fighting labour in the United States from the mid-19th century through to the 1920s.  

Adamic’s history begins with the Molly Maguires, or “Mollies”, a group of ruthlessly aggressive Irish immigrant miners who would kill any mining bosses that created unfavourable conditions.  This history then progresses into early wildcat strikes which led to the organization of labour unions.  Adamic has a fondness for the more radical unions (such as his own IWW) and opposes them to the more bureaucratic and conservative unions like the American Federation of Labor (AFL) formed under the boss-like cigarmaker Samuel L. Gompers.  The heroes of Dynamite are probably Bill Haywood, the brawling Miners Union leader, and Eugene V. Debs, the radical leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, who personally led their rank and file into street battles with police and strikebreakers.  Adamic appears to have a fondness, as well, for the users of dynamite, as the statement “Dynamite!  That’s the stuff!” appears throughout his text as an affirmation of radical labour’s fighting spirit. Woven into Ademic’s historical narrative of violent labour activity are the stories of anarchists who have taken up the cause, or of related persecution of anarchists of this period, including the episode of Alexander Berkman’s attempted assassination of mine boss Henry Clay Frick, Louis Lingg and the Haymarket Explosion, and the Sacco and Vanzetti trial and execution, which occurred while Ademic was researching and writing this text.

Adamic seems to adore the fighting spirit, even the willingness to use dynamite to advance the interests of working people. Conversely, he speaks with derision of Gomper’s willingness to compromise, negotiate with bosses, which he portrays as the behavior of one who was essentially a career politician. Furthermore, when Adamic speaks of Miner and IWW leader “Big” Bill Haywood’s willingness to leap into combat with only his fists as weapons, he discusses with loathing the AFL’s alliances with Mafia ‘protection’ men, and hired brutes who fought against the bosses’ Pinkerton (for-hire strikebreaking muscle) bullies. Thus Adamic identifies a rift in the American labor movement and firmly priviledges one side over another in his narration of the history of labor-centered violence.

anarchism - book - 1964 - The Anarchists

The Anarchists
James Joll
Methuen & Co. Ltd.
1964 (2nd ed. 1979)
299 pages

One of the things I love about library books are the handwritten notes that are left in the page margins by other patrons. I know that vast numbers of library patrons hate that people make marks in these books and consider it disrespectful, but I love that each book can, over time, accumulate the specific signs of its use.  Almost every page of the copy of early sociologist George H. Mead’s Mind, Self and Society that I borrowed from UofT’s Robarts Library was so heavily underlined that it had the stippled texture of 19th century Japanese Prints. My secondhand copy of Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s Down To This, a diary of living in Toronto’s turn-of the century tent city, includes a handmade index on the inside back cover so that a previous reader could make certain aspects of the text accessible on his or her return to the book.  

I borrowed a copy of The Anarchists by James Joll, a British historian whose career was mostly focused on the politically radical (he also wrote a book about the Socialist Second International, and a biography of the Italian Marxist leader and philosopher, Antonio Gramsci) from the UofT Scarborough Library, and includes notes by other borrowers recommending other, better books on anarchist history.  While Joll’s book can now be seen as a truncated survey of anarchist thought that has, since its publication, been eclipsed in importance by more thorough studies like Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible, at the time of its first publication The Anarchists was basically opening up the field of anarchist studies.  Joll charts a history of anarchist thought from the Gnostics of early Christendom to the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War, although he focuses most of his work on the anarchists of the 19th century: in particular on the thought and deeds of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin.  

Joll’s analysis takes a close look at the effects of anarchist writings and speech and the competing philosophical tendencies within the broad anarchist scene.  One of the notes written in the copy of this book that I read stated “an excellent book which, among other things, clears up many seemingly inconsistent ideas in anarchist thought is “Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis” by Alan Ritter, 1980.”  This note doesn’t dissolve the value of Joll’s history but, in its recommendation of another text, it does mark the social function of library books and their ability to communicate between patrons.