Struggling with Integrity: An Interview with Walt Odets by Jon Robin Baitz

Awake and Sing!
Lincoln Center Theatre Review
Spring 2006, Issue 42


This past January, the playwright Jon Robin Baitz traveled to Berkeley, California, to meet with Walt Whitman Odets. "Walt Odets is clipped, guarded and deeply introspective," Robbie wrote us, "as well as a scrupulously honest old-school gentleman. He smokes endlessly-little black cigarettes, maybe Nat Shermans. We talked for many hours in the music room of his house, which was always smoky and dark. And Walt, who is a clinical psychologist as well as a renowned horologist, pilot, inventor and photographer, answered my questions with precision and candor. "

Robbie Baitz: You have said to me that you're careful about how you sign your name.

Walt Odets: I'm not careful about it, but I sign it illegibly. That's my signature. If someone asks me why, I say it's because I sign my name so much that I want to do it quickly. The truth is, I do it so as not to provoke a discussion.

RB: What kind of discussion does the name provoke: You're the son of...? Are you related to...?

WO: Are you related to... That type of discussion. Generally, people think I'm too young for Clifford Odets to have been my father. They're curious about the name, because it is so unusual. Gorodetsky was a common name. It means " urban man."

RB: He's the guy from the city.

WO: Right. New York was his beat. [Laughter] I think he was at home no-where like he was at home in New York. In Los Angeles, he looked like a freak.

RB: Was he in exile in Los Angeles?

WO: Yeah. And he looked like he was. He walked around in these frumpy woolen clothes all the time. That's all he had were these woolen New York suits.

RB: Did he hate being in L.A.?

WO: He hated it, but I suspect it gave him some refuge from the rejection that New York directed at him. You know, he'd work on a play for two years and make four thousand bucks. Then you go to the coast, and they say, " You shmuck. You're selling out." I don't know what people expected him to do. The story, which I think everyone knows, is his father was a very ambitious businessman and wanted him to be a successful businessman. When my father as a teenager said he wanted to be an actor in the theater, to my grandfather this was like saying he wanted to be a whore. My father struggled against that his whole life. One of the strongest memories I have is when I was very young, maybe eight or nine, he asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. Of course, I hem-med and hawed and tried to say something that would please him. And he said, It doesn't matter. "The only important thing is to never do anything for money. " He said it with such intensity and importance attached to it.

RB: In his work, he insisted on the importance of human dignity. He wasn't in service to a concept. He was a student of cruelty, too-the cruelty of life, what it could do. The way the systems worked. The powerlessness of the individual.

WO: His father was the paradigm for that. His father was very cruel. So my father transferred a lot of feelings about his father to the economic machine and all that. My father was actually sort of incompetent about money. He earned money to pay bills and stuff, but in terms of accumulating money or having an interest in being wealthy, he had absolutely no interest in that whatsoever. Because that's the only thing his father pursued.

RB: What was your grandfather's relationship to your father's success?

WO: He liked the success.

RB: Did he understand the work?

WO: I don't think he understood the emotion of the work. I think he understood it conceptually.

RB: Did he see himself in it?

WO: No, of course not. I don't know how to describe him. His name was Louis, but he gave himself a middle initial and told people to call him L.J. He thought that sounded important. He died ten or fifteen years after my father.

RB: This sounds like an obvious question, but when your father died, did it break his father's heart?

WO: No. My grandfather didn't have a heart. He had a pump. [Laughter] I don't know how better to put it.

RB: An immigrant's pump.

WO: An immigrant's pump, exactly. Some-one who had been through a trial of such kind that I don't understand it-that he had a pump instead of a heart.

RB: Did your father try to gain a measure of his father's understanding?

WO: Yes. He always wanted that. When my mother died, we moved to the Chateau Marmont hotel for two years. My father had an apartment above us, and my sister, Nora, and I and our nanny lived in an apartment below. After that, largely so that I could be in the Beverly Hills school system, my father rented a house in Beverly Hills-802 North Bedford-which turned out to be the house that my mother grew up in. My father had no idea. He got it from a real estate agent. Then my father-crazily, I think-tried to make a family out of us, and he asked L.J. and his second wife to move into the house with us. When my father would get home from work, my grandfather had my sister and me standing at the front door with bedroom slippers and a newspaper to greet him. And my father walked in one night and said, "Sir, do you think these kids are servants? I don't want my bedroom slippers, I'm not interested in the newspaper, and the kids are not servants!" My father would fly into rages with his father about things like this and finally, after about six months, threw him out. My father could never stand this man. And my father supported him the whole time-sent him money, a regular income. He was miserable in L.A. It's possible he might have been miserable anywhere, but there was a certain component of the misery that was about being in Los Angeles. I think of him sitting on the sofa, listening to Beethoven, smoking a cigarette in a terry-cloth bathrobe. He wrote his last play eight years before he died. He had two kids to support, and he was living in Los Angeles doing movie jobs, mostly under the table, without credit.

RB: It's not easy to be a screenwriter. It's actually very hard work. You have to learn a different kind of craft and structure, and it's far more mathematical in a lot of ways than writing a play.

WO: He once told me that there'd be situations where some movie star, like Rita Hayworth, would get a scene and sit down in a chair and say, " I'm not reading that line. " And the whole thing would grind to a halt. In those days, as he related it to me, it would cost $25,000 a day to have a movie crew. So the whole thing would grind to a stop, and they'd need someone to rewrite the dialogue. And when that dialogue was rewritten it would affect another scene, and another. My father was very facile. In four or five days he could rewrite the whole thing-get rid of the line an actress objected to and reconstruct the relevant things around it. And then they'd pay him $100,000 for a week of work.

RB: He adjusted to the realities.

WO: Right. When he wanted to make some money, he made money. But in 1954, for instance, he wrote The Flowering Peach. And he only made, like, four thousand bucks on that. Of course he was dissatisfied with himself. But if you run into an artist who tells you that he's happy with his life and he loves his work, he's full of shit. So of course he was unhappy. I don't think he ever wrote a play that was happy.

RB: I'm trying to think if I know any happy playwrights.

WO:Or even playwrights who were happy with a play.

RB: Was New York sort of like Moscow in The Three Sisters? You know, how every year they want to go to Moscow?

WO: For us, it was. The whole time we lived in Los Angeles we went from one rented house to another, all in the same school district, each with a one-year lease. It was because we were always about to move back to New York. But there would always be one last job to finish after another, one last job. All those Beverly Hills houses came with the silverware, furniture, the linens, the napkins. I don't think my father ever owned a towel of his own. We'd move into these completely furnished houses that came with screwdrivers. He spent his money on things like paintings, books and phonograph records.

RB: How do you feel your father might have influenced you?

WO: The influence is so pervasive, it's almost hard to answer the question. I remember when I was in grade school, he helped me with a paper about red Bor-deaux wines. Later, he asked me how it came out. I said I got a B-plus. And he raised an eyebrow and said, " I didn't ask you what your teacher thought of it. I asked you how it came out." It was a revelation, even at that age. The intensity and focus with which he said it made me understand that this was very important. Up until then, I'd accepted the whole idea that one works to please the world. As children, we usually learn that. Integrity is about following yourself. About being generative rather than reactive-generative in an authentic way. He accomplished that, I think, but not to the extent that he might have. He remained very sensitive to publicity and very sensitive to disapproval, very sensitive to others' disappointment, even as he had a kind of independence and even as he pursued integrity. I think my father was famous when he was too young to have fully developed this internal locus for navigation.

RB: Did he spend the rest of his life trying to reclaim that? Or missing it?

WO: I think he did reclaim it to a great extent, but never fully. He was terribly hurt by criticism. Somehow, I knew that.

RB: But he never spoke about it directly.

WO: Not to me. He might have with some people. When he was being interviewed, there was often an element of self-defense in it. He'd try to defend what he was doing and how he was living. He had this great early success, and then experienced a lot of rejection. He was naïve and kind of surprised by the criticism of his work. He felt that you don't abandon someone if one play is not great. He took it on the chin. After 1940, I don't think he had any real acceptance, other than the potboiler The Country Girl. I remember a girlfriend of his once said to me, "You know, when he wrote The Country Girl he spit it out as fast as he could type it. When he wrote The Flowering Peach, it was like watching someone tear off pieces of his own flesh and try to mash them into the shape of a baby." She said it was too painful to watch.

RB: I asked you what kind of effect he had on you, and it's important to point out that you've written a great deal about AIDS. You've been an activist. You were a controversial figure in the AIDS world early on, when you were one of the few people talking about the necessity of prevention. And you elicited a lot of anger in your own work. There has to have been some influence from your father, in that you did what you thought was right. Perhaps you were instilled with a certain kind of moral programming, a code. Your father's moral universe had some influence on your moral universe.

WO: When I was out in public a lot talking, I realized I couldn't try to anticipate how people would feel about something. What I said to myself was, "You have to do your best in this work, think it through as carefully as you're capable of, then you have to be honest and acknowledge your limitations." That allowed me to steer a course that was relatively free of reactivity. I suppose I got that from my father. Because he wasn't a pleaser. He didn't resort to that.


RB: It's a big lesson to learn from your parents, to learn how to make noise.

WO: The playwright Bill [William] Gibson said to me recently, " You know, your father was the only person I've ever known who was truly bigger than life." I don't know how he got that way.

RB: Did you experience him as larger than life?

WO: I did. Though part of that is that our parents have a kind of power that no one else will ever have. So that distorts my per-ception. But people adored him or hated him, you know? I've never heard anyone say, "I kind of like Clifford Odets." [Laughter]

RB: Walt, you have said to me that you ve always carried a measure of shame about his life.

WO: I think ninety percent of it was tied to the HUAC thing. And maybe another ten percent of that, the sell-out thing. I heard both of

RB: What would you hear?

WO: When my father died, I read his obituary in the paper, and it said, " He was a playwright of early promise who sold out to Hollywood." My father had so instilled in me this issue of integrity that I was stunned by that. But I got used to it. But with HUAC what people say is that Clifford Odets is one of those who named names. I think probably, oh, fifty times in my life, someone has said something to me about it-almost as if they were confronting my father. When I read that a book of all the HUAC testimonies of famous people had been compiled, I finally decided okay, I'll get it and read it. I'll get it over with, find out exactly what he did and not just have feelings about this. When I read it, I was enormously relieved. He constantly confronted the Committee. It's a wonder they didn't throw him out on his duff. It was an eloquent, confrontative discussion. He only named people who were already known-names that had been published in the papers before his testimony.

RB: He cooperated, but in his idealism and naïveté perhaps he was less than fully aware of the extent to which he was being used.

WO: And the Committee could say, " Clifford Odets cooperated with us. We asked him questions and he answered."

RB: The smart money would have been to either take the Fifth or be even more belligerent.

WO: He was pretty belligerent. He believed that taking the Fifth meant he had something to hide-and he had nothing to hide.

RB: But you could call him a cooperative witness. And they had someone else, a notch on the belt-Clifford Odets.

WO: I would have made the same naïve mistake.

RB: Me, too.

WO: I would have been right in there saying, " Fuck you. This is what was going on. This is who I am. And a congressional committee is not going to tell me, who named his son after America's greatest poet, what it means to be an American. "

RB: That's what he said?

WO: Yeah. [Laughter] But you're right. It was naïve. And, of course, the testimony was secret for a long time, so early on no one could read it. I don't think that there was any Freedom of Information Act then. So it was: Clifford Odets cooperated. For years he had a lot of wonderful paintings that he would loan to his friends. A Klee, a Matisse. He'd say, " Give it back when you get tired of it." The morning after the news about his testimony came out in the papers, he opened the front door of the apartment and there were three paintings stacked in the hallway. His friends had brought them back. He was baffled by it. Maybe he wasn't thinking about the notion of cooperating. Or maybe he was. Maybe he wanted to protect his ability to work. My mother had died. He was taking care of us. Maybe that factored into it. People always assume that, had they been in that situation, they would have done something more honorable. I assume I would have done what I had to do to get by. I said that to Bill Gibson and he said, "Those shmucks had nothing to lose. Your father had a lot to lose. He was taking care of you kids. He had to support you." Then he shook his head and said, "Nora."

RB: It's a lot to live with.

WO: It's obvious from the plays, his whole life was about the struggle for integrity-his integrity as an artist, but also as a person. The theme is obvious in his plays. I think integrity is about honesty, and it's about trying to make the best choices with the fewest compromises in one's decisions. He tried to do that in his interpersonal relationships. He did that even as a parent. When my sister, Nora, was born in 1945, she weighed a little over one pound and was in an incubator for more than six months. I remember my father telling me that she was the size of a Listerine bottle. As she got older, it became clear that she had serious pervasive developmental disabilities. She saw five to six doctors a week. Her monthly medical expenses cost as much as all the other household expenses combined. My father was a very conscientious parent. Nora became a central task in his life. He could never have supported her in New York.

RB: Do you remember him as being sick before he died?

WO: Yes. He had stomach problems. He was very sick by the time they diagnosed the cancer and recommended exploratory surgery. He had colon cancer. I don't know how he survived the pain, but he did. He went into the hospital and two weeks later he was dead. I was sixteen when he died. My memory of him is: lots of faults, lots of inconsistency, but always the pursuit of integrity in every aspect of his life.

Jon Robin Baitz is the author of The Paris Letter, The Substance of Fire, Ten Un-knowns and A Fair Country, among other plays. His screenplays include People I Know (2003) and the film adaptation of The Substance of Fire (1996). For TV he has written episodes of The West Wing and Alias.






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Beyond the 'American Dream' by Morris Dickstein

The Great Depression drew unprecedented attention to the once invisible America inhabited by the poor- to the warped lives in all the suffocating ghettos, past and present; to destitute tenant farmers, cultivating depleted soil; to migrant families and itinerant children, and to their ramshackle Hoovervilles, which caricatured the very idea of home and shelter. In The Invisible Scar (1966), Caroline Bird goes so far to insist, with some hyperbole, that "the Depression did not depress the conditions of the poor. It mere publicized them. The poor had been poor all along. It was just that nobody had looked at them."


But the economic collapse that squeezed the poor also seriously damaged the lives of the middle class and even of the rich, who because they had already enjoyed so much of the promise of the American life, had more to lose, including their self-respect. This is somewhat patronizing, for it underestimates how much the members of the working class had to lose; with long-term unemployment, they had no cushion, nothing to fall back on. Theirs was a dilemma of survival, not status, a fear of homelessness and even starvation. Never-the-less, the specter for the middle class was a pervasive "fear of falling", the humiliation of "coming down in the world." The Great Depression challenged the notion that the United States was an essentially middle-class nation, a land of progress and opportunity in which everyone could become middle class. It challenged not only America's economy and political system, but also undermined the central myths and beliefs upon which the system was founded.


In some ways these beliefs were well founded. Through much of American history, some avenues of progress and opportunity were readily available. Despite racial exclusions, nativist prejudices, and sometimes vile working conditions, there was cheap, abundant land as well a industrial work in an expanding economy. The labor could be backbreaking, the working hours appalling, but the social mobility was real.

In theory (and often in practice too), America was born of the secular pluralism of the Enlightenment and the revolutionary ideal of the career open to talents, not simply birth or wealth. "In the United States", intoned one newspaper editorial in 1937,

...every man has worked who had the ambition and opportunity to do so. There has been no class of idle rich. The average industrialist has put in as many hours as the salaried man or wage earner, and he often points with pride to the number of jobs he has been able to afford for others through the efforts of his own thrift, intelligence and industry.

Abraham Lincoln put it well when he said: "There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us. Twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer. the hired laborer of yesterday labors on his own account today, and will hire others to labor for him tomorrow."

Here is embodied the true American principle of progress. It is in recognition of such a principle that we built the greatest economic empire ever known to man, in a little more than a century and a half.


It's hard to ignore the defensive tone of this editorial. It belongs specifically to the Great Depression, when this optimistic view of mobility and America's economic destiny was under siege as never before. This and many other similar editorials proceeded from naive professions of faith to attacks on those who would preach class consciousness and the "redistribution of wealth through increasingly high taxes", on the Russian model..

The Great Depression challenged key tenets of the American ideology. Longstanding beliefs were called into question, especially the myth of success enshrined in the notion of the American Dream. The thirties was the first period in which the phrase "the American Dream" was commonly used, just when its premise of limitless opportunity and economic abundance seemed suddenly in doubt. There had been many earlier recessions and even depressions but none had lasted so long or cut so deep- and above all, none exerted the immense psychological impact. The Great Depression weakened many Americans' most common assumptions; that reverses in the business cycle were brief and temporary, that jobs would always be available to those willing to work, that businessmen were the oracles and seers of society, that the younger generation would always be able to come up in the world and do better than their parents.

The roots of these convictions have been studied exhaustively by cultural historians. The success myth goes back to the Puritan belief in work as a secular calling and in wealth as an outward manifestation of inner grace. In his widely read Autobiography, and in works like Poor Richard's Almanack, "The Way To Wealth," and "Advice to a Young Tradesman", Benjamin Franklin secularized this notion of calling even further, moving towards the ideal of the self-made man.

But Franklin was was not the sole inventor of the self-made man. Its growth in the nineteenth century, when hundreds of writers, preachers and lecturers expounded the gospel of success, was deeply rooted in American individualism, in popular religion, in highly simplified versions of Emersonian "self-reliance," and, above all, in the realities of a growing capitalist economy. A nation shifting from an agrarian to an industrial economy, from a rural to an urban society- a nation whose class lines were fluid and whose official faith was populist and democratic- provided a material base for an ethic of competitive individualism.

The notion of the self-made man was originally a democratic ideal, a dream of social mobility- and even of Kultur- not simply for a small elite but for the common man. The "poor boy who made good" was a powerful weapon to fight a haughty European air of social and artistic superiority. The Jeffersonian concept of leadership based on an aristocracy of virtues and talents was beaten down by a Jacksonian belief that anyone could rule. This common-man, log-cabin-to-White-House ideal reached its apogee in the career and the subsequent mythology of Abraham Lincoln. It was only after the Civil War that the self-made man became virtually synonymous with the businessman. As the political and cultural aspects of this ideal- the model of the great statesman, the great writer, the great orator- began to diminish, the myth took on a strongly conservative, even philistine coloring; it became a defense of the status quo, a way of blaming the victim, the loser. This was the heyday of Social Darwinism and the influence of Herbert Spencer, who coined the term "the survival of the fittest." In the ruthless, competitive climate of the Gilded Age, the idea of success hardened into a Darwinian formula that condemned the poor as either lazy or inferior...

The dissipation of confidence of American's in their Dream and the rise of fear- reached a climax in the virtual collapse of the economy in the four months between the 1932 election and FDR's inauguration in early March, culminating in the bank crisis, which had been building for two years and today is considered the linchpin of the Depression, even more than the stock market Crash. An apt psychological analogy was made by one observer in the New York Times in 1932. who likened the mood of the time to the depressive phrase of the manic-depressive cycle, marked by hopelessness, panic, listless activity and deep apprehensions about the future or, as Roosevelt put it in his inaugural address: "nameless, unreasonable, unjustified terror."..

As serious writers began to emphasize the limitations and distortions of the American Dream, popular artists became obsessed with fantastic, even magical images of success. In the first category were writers like Clifford Odets, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos. Buoying up the popular culture were gangster films and backstage musicals that reinvented rags-to-riches fantasies in terms the Depression audiences loved and needed.

Meanwhile, many New Dealers and radical intellectuals were trying to redefine American individualism in communitarian terms that played down individual effort and competitive achievement. They insisted on a new ideal of mutual welfare just when the New Deal was priming the capitalist pump and creating federally funded make-work jobs to restore individual self-worth.

At the heart of the New Deal was a tension between individualism and community, between private initiative and public planning. Out of this conflict capitalism was saved, in the modified form of the welfare state; the success ethic survived, but the federal government began to take a more active role in most American's lives. A new ethos took hold, not to be seriously challenged until the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan set out to convince Americans that greed was good, wealth was no embarrassment, and government itself was the problem.

'Fist Held High" by Amy Bass

On May 11, 1976, a few months before the United States plunged into celebrations of its bicentennial, secretary of the interior Thomas S. Kleppe announced the approval of the Du Bois site in Great Barrington, Massachusetts as a National Historic Landmark. The W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite gained its title to Landmark status as part of the Heritage Preservation Service, authorized by the Secretary of the Interior as a nationally significant area because it "holds exceptional value and quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States; a place that forges a common bond between all Americans."The National Park Service's "statement of significance" reads as follows:

"Only ruins mark the site of the boyhood home of prominent sociologist and writer William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. A major figure in the African-American civil rights movement during the first half of the 20th century, he helped found the NAACP. He authored more than 20 books and several hundred articles. He was the first African-American to receive a PH.D. degree from Harvard, and his dissertation, "The Suppression of the African Slave Trade.' became the first volume in the Harvard Historical Studies..."

As part of an effort to rebuild interest in Du Bois after several years of relative inactivity and quiet, the Berkshire Eagle spotlighted Du Bois in a feature article in its magazine, Berkshires Week, written by freelancer Steve Turner, formerly of Great Barrington. Entitled "Black Sheep of the Native Sons", the piece summarize the creation of the Landmark honorto Du Bois and noted that " the whirl-wind of controversy that existed in the life of W.E.B. Du Bois continues to swirl through his hometown" and argued that the storm had an undeniable racial aspect to it:

"Small country towns, as a general rule, have memorials to their world-famous native sons. But when the town is white and the native son is black, and a brilliant black radical at that- a racial organizer as well as a scholar, educator, novelist, poet and diplomat, a leader in the attempt to unseat powerful social and economic elites and an early advocate of black pride- then the rule meets the exception. Add a touch of declared membership in the Communist party, and the rule just...What rule?"

Turner observed that, in 1968, after the community protested the idea to memorialize "this renowned black man" with "every device short of violence," there had been little progress in the eight years that followed. Describing the other Berkshire landmarks as "structurally splendid places", Turner noted that because of the lack of buildings and signage, making the site difficult to locate, "the Du Bois site comes up a lttle short," with only the cellar hole and crumbled chimney where Du Bois spent his childhood. But the lack of development of the site, he continued, belied its historical significance. The homestead represented the family of Du Bois's mother as well as the famed civil rights leader, descendants of one whose good turns in the American Revolution gave him his freedom and put his roots in Great Barrington with the earliest of its settlers. The site represented early African American New England, a community that helped create the first black doctorate graduated from Harvard, And Du Bois remembered that community, burying his first wife and child in the town's cemetery, and hoped to someday to renovate the home of his boyhood for his retirement.

As for the controversy over Du Bois as "a longtime proponent of socialism," "a contradiction developed," Turner argued. "The country might happily offer monuments and cultural tributes to infamous crooks such as Blackbeard and Jessie James, not to mention an enormous clutch of anti-democratic financiers, robber barons and renowned racists; but a memorial to a left-wing black hero was unacceptable."

Turner called the year in which the Du Bois Memorial Committee formed- 1968- the most riotous in the area since Shay's Rebellion. He claimed that in addition to the town's attempt to close down the park because of zoning, there were "at least 30" threats to blow up the park, and that many members of the committee were threatened. An article in the Berkshire Courier, Turner pointed out, advised opponents of the park to boycott the dedication ceremony and "leave the monument to those who will undoubtedly take out their wrath on it in the weeks to come." Such vitriolic opposition came from somewhere, but Turner determined that no one would admit what really stood at the core: race.

In an interview, Turner asked George Francis, editor and publisher of the Courier, why the hostility had grown to such levels. Francis answered:

"The black thing didn't enter into it at all. A lot of us were duped into the Vietnam war then. It hadn't proved to be such a monstrous waste of men and materials. And with us losing people in Vietnam, it seemed the wrong time to put up a monument to a communist."

On the other hand, Walter Wilson, founder of the Memorial Committeee, dismissed Francis's rationale: "Du Bois was the most important man ever born in the Berkshires, but he was being ignored here long before he joined the party..,.The Communist issue is not pertinent at all." But Turner also found people who were beginning to separate the different aspects of Du Bois's life. "Some people may agree with him and some may not," said Paul Ivory. "But his deeds and publications had an impact on American history, and that's the measure for recognition." Even Francis seemed to have come around somewhat. "Attitudes have changed" he admitted. "I don't think there'll be any opposition to the Landmark at all. The Watergate thing and the war kind of took the wind out of the opposition's sails. They're not so willing to wave the flag and say "My country, right or wrong."

However, one response to Steve Turner's piece in the Berkshire Week indicated that much remained the same. Gerard Chapman, an op-ed page contributor to the Berkshire Eagle wrote " I do not believe that the indifference or even violent opposition to a memorial is based on racial animosity, but the fact that he went over to the enemy in the last years of his life...

I think there is still a lingering feeling that Du Bois was a fool and the worse for going over to the communists; Du Bois "blew it". Unquestionably he was a man of great abilities and accomplishments, and some day he will be recognized for them. But Russia is till our enemy, despite the cultural exchanges and detente, and until Russia throws its power on the side of peace and civilized behavior, those who embrace it will be out of popular favor. Yes, Du Bois blew it, he was so discouraged over the lack of progress from his efforts to ameliorate the lot of blacks that his emotions got the better of his critical faculties, perhaps because of his advanced age. He undid much of what he accomplished. There are many blacks in this country who have suffered discrimination but who have been smart enough to know that for all its faults, the United States is gradually approaching acceptance of "ethnic" minorities...Russian solicitude for minorities is an illusion. Russia makes a great show of accepting them for education, but actually such minorities are kept under wraps most of the time, to be trotted out for propaganda purposes on occasion. Du Bois, in his dotage, did not perceive this, and that, rather than his being black, was -and is- the reason for lack of interest in his memorial.


Ironically, Edward W. Brooke, who in 1966 was the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate in eighty-five years, a member of the original memorial committee, defended his support for the project in 1968 on similar grounds, painting Du Bois as an old man who had been so irreparably scared by racism that he had made an irrational decision- rather the studied and thoughtful conclusion- to choose communism over democracy:

"The memorial could serve as a living reminder to all of us what can happen when the forces of intolerance, racism and injustice make despairing men believe that causes like communism provide the only alternative to a decent life in their homeland".

Today, in 2009, whether the Du Bois Center, the revamped W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Committee, the signs or the various Du Bois events that continue to find their way into the local calendar will lead to a more permanent home in Great Barrington's history cannot yet be determined. For the townspeople of Great Barrington, Du Bois became, to borrow a phrase from historian Paul Boyer, a 'litmus test of patriotism" Thus, the story of his story remains somewhat the same: anti-communist, often racially expressed sentiment seems to meet each step of commemoration that Du Bois's relatively small group of supporters take, much in the manner that it greeted Walter Wilson's dream for a small piece of field to be made special.

The opposition does not remain silent, for, as David Bright has observed, "all memory is prelude." As the Cold War becomes grounded in the past, the sentiments and actions it created slide almost seamlessly into the post-9/11 era. Binaries of "us versus them" exist in amorphous yet devastating ways; someone- on behalf of and for the good of the general public- is continually trying to figure out who the "us" is, since the "them" remains part of an imaginary state of emergency, albeit one with very real ramifications, as it continues to drive U.S. foreign policy in much the same way it did in the Vietnam era.


Thus, the legacy of disavowal that continues to surround Du Bois in his hometown, in the wake of and regardless of signs and ceremonies, ensures that we must continually push to understand how national and global situations continue to be digested and dealt with at the most local of levels. Then, perhaps, we can better expose the power of racial enmity hidden in the efforts that proclaim to be focused on security and well-being, and well masked in patriotic language that seems available to only a few who are lucky enough to reside in America's quintessential small towns, yet feel compelled to take on the battles of the world. Only then can we learn just how silent we actually are, for only after the debate is over- regardless of how long or loud it is- can we see how very little came of all that noise.


"Those About Him Remained Silent; The Battle Over W.E.B. Du Bois" by Amy Bass; University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis;2009

Health Care Reform by James Gailbraith

Health care per se is not a market; if you draw a supply-and-demand diagram for health care there is no quantity to put on the horizontal axis and no price to record on the vertical axis.It is not a commodity that is bought and sold at a given price on an open market. Proposals to introduce market forces in health care are largely concerned not with the provision of health care itself but with the provision of health insurance.

The intrinsic costs of providing insurance are relatively low. There are no expensive inputs to purchase, no uncertainty of design or technology to be concerned with. The major inputs are personnel and computing capacity. There are few major issues of innovation; unlike the rapid changes characteristic of medical practice, the service of providing insurance to pay for them does not evolve rapidly. A successful private insurance company follows an ancient formula; it stratifies its clientele by risk class and charges premiums adapted to each class. The most successful companies are generally those that manage to exclude the riskiest clents.

Public universal health insurance schemes like Medicare do not evaluate risk. Since they are universal, they do not need to. Therefore, they save the major cost of providing private health care insurance. They pay their personnel at civil service salary scales and are under no obligation to return a dividend to shareholders or meet a target rate of return. Insurance in general is therefore intrinsically a service that the public sector can competently provide at lower cost than the private sector, and from the standpiont of an entire population, selective private provision of health insurance is invariably inferior to universal public provision.

Private health insurance companies would not exist except for their political capacity to forestall the creation of universal public systems, backed by their almost unlimited capacity to sow confusion among the general public over the basic economic facts. Liberals who support anything less than a common, public insurance pool have no argument. They are simply tugging their forelocks and bending their knee before the bastion of private power...not even offering another another glass of the proverbial liberal small beer.

The reliance on private insurers makes universal coverage unaffordable.

Missing Fathers by Eduardo Galeano

The Declaration of Independence affirmed that all men were created equal.

Shortly thereafter, the Constitution of the United States clarified the concept: it established that each slave was worth three-fifths of a person.

One drafter of the Constitution, Gouverneur Morris, opposed this provision, but in vain. Not long before he had tried, also in vain, to get the State of New York to abolish slavery, and managed to extract a constitutional promise that in the future "every being who breaths the air of this State shall enjoy the privileges of a freeman."

Morris, a central figure at the moment the United States acquired a face and a soul, was a founding father that history forgot.


In the year 2006, Spanish journalist Vicente Romero looked for his grave. He found it behind a church in the South Bronx. The gravestone, erased by rain and sun, provided a platform for two large garbage cans.


Robert Carter was buried in the garden.

In his will he asked "to be laid under a shady tree, where he might be undisturbed, and sleep in peace and security. No stone, nor inscription."

This Virginian patrician was one of the richest, if not the richest, of all the prosperous landowners who broke ties with England.

Although several other founding fathers looked askance at slavery, none of them freed their slaves. Carter was the only one to unchain the four hundred and fifty blacks he owned "to allow them to live and work according to their own will and pleasure." He freed them seventy years before Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery, and did so gradually, taking care that none was simply turned out and deserted.

Such folly condemned him to solitude and oblivion.

He was cut off by his friends, his neighbors, and his family, all of who were convinced that free blacks were a threat to personal and national security.

Later on, his acts were rewarded with collective amnesia.

The Snake Head by Patrick Keefe

On May 16, 2005, Sister Ping was escorted into a courtroom in the federal courthouse on Pearl Street in downtown New York City. It had been over a decade since she fled from the neighborhood to take refuge in China, and she was visibly older; her face was still unlined, but her hair, which had grown long, was streaked with gray. She wore a smart black pantsuit, the professional garb of an inoffensive businesswoman. It was a canny choice of uniform: a businesswoman, Sister Ping would maintain throughout the trial, was all she had ever been. The courtroom was filled with press, and with dozens of supporters and relatives from Chinatown....


"This is a case about the brutal business of smuggling human beings into the United States for profit, and about one woman, the defendant, Cheng Chui Ping, who rose to become one of the most powerful and most successful alien smugglers in our time," one of the prosecutors declared... To make its case, the government produced a devastatingly comprehensive array of former criminal associates...But the most damning witness was the man who had been living in a temporary jail cell since 1994, the man whose decidedly complicated history with Sister Ping was about to undergo one final twist.


Sister Ping sat quietly through the testimony, listening through headphones to a simultaneous translation and occasionally taking notes. Her attorney hammered at the credibility of the government's witness... In his closing arguments, Hochheiser invoked the Arthur Miller play The Crucible, about the witch trials in Salem. Most of his indignation was directed at Ah Kay:

"He ordered the murders. One beating we heard about, ten ordered beatings, ten to twenty robberies, forty to fifty extortions, two arsons, at least a thousand alien smugglings, one racketeering, one gun possession, one parole violation, tax evasion, and fake passports." Hochheiser was a veteran defense attorney- a seasoned litigator who had spent years representing the Westies, a violent Irish American gang based in Hell's Kitchen- but even he seemed sincerely impressed by the length of Ak Kay's rap sheet. "That's one of your main witnesses!", he exclaimed.....


On June 22, after five days of deliberation, the jury members sent a note to Judge Mukasey saying that they had "come to an impasse" on count two, the hostage-taking charge. Hochheiser promptly requested a mistrial on that count. He feared that when the jury left the courthouse each day, they were being exposed to a barrage of negative publicity. It was true that the local newspapers in New York were painting an unflattering portrait of sister Ping and suggesting that she had somehow been the ringleader behind the infamous grounding of the Golden Venture on Rockaway Peninsula in 1993.* It could not have helped that during the trial, in an unrelated incident, a restaurant worker from New Jersey had been gunned down at Sister Ping's restaurant on East Broadway. The headline in the Daily News that day was "Evil Incarnate".

But if Sister Ping was demonized in the mainstream New York Press, she was lionized in Chinatown. Copies of the city's Chinese-language dailies sold out at newstands throughout the trial. There was a great upswell of sympathy in the neighborhood, where Sister Ping was widely regarded as someone who had provided a service, lifting a generation of people out of dead-end lives of rural poverty. The World Journal reported that in Sister Ping's home village of Shengmei, people were volunteering to do jail time on her behalf. They described her as a "living Buddha". Ninety percent of the villagers now lived overseas and had managed to leave China through the good offices of Sister Ping. The remaining residents- well maintained by the remittances of the emigrants- prepared a petition to send to Judge Mukasey, requesting leniency.

To be sure, there was a diversity of opinion among Fulianese in both China and the United States on the subject of the famous snakehead, but the prevailing attitude in Chinatown was that while she may have broken the laws, her crimes were essentially victimless, and were ultimately justified in terms of the prosperity they created for her customers. What you thought about Sister Ping depended at least in part on the value you attached to a single human life and how that value factored into a larger calculation of possible benefits and possible risks. "In China, a human life isn't worth ten pennies," Justin Yu explained in his book, "Ten thousand people come to America and one hundred people die? Bad luck. If they make it, their families get rich. Their villages get rich."


So for American-born prosecutors and members of the press to focus on the ten dead from the Golden Venture, or on the hazards and depredations of the journey, was to miss the point, and to indulge in a conception of the preciousness of human life and the primacy of physical comforts that would be foreign to the Fulianese because it wold render almost any risk untenable. Sister Ping's business was inherently risky, and her clients understood those risks and accepted them. The key to understanding the snakehead trade was the concept of "acceptable risk, Yu concluded. " Acceptable cruelty, acceptable lousy treatment, acceptable long trip, there's no toilet. It's acceptable. Because of the comparison: the life there and the life here".

[In the wake of the Golden Venture incident in 1993 and the negative publicity it generated for Bejing, the Futianese authorities launched a far-reaching anti-snakehead campaign, vowing to hunt down and prosecute the smugglers and discourage local people from leaving illegally. In Sister Ping's village officials erected a sign that said, "It seriously damages the reputation of our party and our country, undermines border security, destroys public stability, and ruins the general social atmosphere." But in reality the campaign and its placards amounted to so much lip service. For the Fulianese who could now afford refrigerators and televisions, who could purchase cars and throw decadent wedding banquets or build new homes, no amount of propaganda or persuasion could diminish the widely held conviction that the snakehead trade was a fundamental social good- that had enabled hundreds of thousands of people to pull themselves out of poverty and indulge in material comforts that would have been unimaginable to the generation before them.]

After several days of further deliberation, in 2005, the jury returned a verdict, guilty of conspiracy, trafficking in ransom proceeds, and one count of money laundering.... The press took little notice of it , but the jury acquitted Sister Ping on count four, the only charge that linked her to the Golden Venture. But it made little difference. Her name and face would always be synonymous with that voyage.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Venture

Columbus by Eduardo Galeano

Defying the fury of the winds and the hunger of ship-eating monsters, Admiral Christopher Columbus set sail.

He did not discover America. The Polynesians had arrived a century previous, and the Vikings four centuries before that. And three hundred centuries before them all came the oldest inhabitants of these lands, the people who Columbus called Indians, believing he had entered the Orient by the back door.

Since he did not understand what they said, Columbus was convinced the natives did not know how to speak. Since they went about naked, were docile, and gave up everything in return for nothing, he believed they were not thinking beings.

Although he died insisting his travels had taken him to Asia, Columbus did begin to harbor doubts on his second voyage. When his ships anchored of the Cuban coast in the middle of June 1494, the admiral dictated a statement affirming that he was in China. He left written evidence that his crew agreed: anyone saying the contrary was to receive a hundred lashes, be fined ten thousand maravedies, and have his tongue cut out.

At the bottom of the page, the few sailors who knew how to write signed their names.