The Indigenous Origins of the Civil Rights Movement by Christopher Lasch

Like Lincoln, King urged his followers to refuse any compromise with injustice but to combine militancy with moral forbearance and forgiveness. Having grown up under an intolerably oppressive system of race relations, he understood the equally dangerous temptations of acquiescence and revenge. When he first experienced the full impact of segregation, as a boy, he found himself ‘determined to hate every white person,’ and ‘this feeling continued to grow,’ he later said, even though his parents told him that he ‘should not hate the white man, but that it was his duty, as a Christian, to love him.’ The only way to overcome hatred of your enemy, however, was to stand up to him: such was the first principle of militant nonviolence, as King came to understand it as an adult. Black people had to overcome their deep feelings of inferiority, to confront their oppressors as equals, and to challenge segregation head on. They could no longer be content, like Daddy King, simply to stake out a subordinate position of relative security in a permanently segregated society. But they had to declare war on segregation –here was the second principle underlying King’s position, even more difficult to grasp than the first, let alone put into practice – without appealing to their history of victimization in order to claim a position of moral superiority. That King should have come to see that racial hatred feeds off self-righteousness and acquiescence alike testified to his capacity for spiritual growth. What is even more remarkable is that he was able to implant this understanding in the heart of the civil rights movement and to hold the movement to its difficult course through ten years of frightful tribulations.

Inspired leadership alone, of course, does not explain the movement’s notable combination of militancy and moral self-restraint. Its triumphs rested on the more humble achievements of people like King’s father who had managed, over the years, to build a vigorous black community in Southern towns and cities, under the most unpromising conditions. The core of that community was the church, and the civil rights movement was ‘strong,’ as Bayard Rustin pointed out, because it was ‘built upon the most stable institution of the southern Negro community – the Church.’ The church furnished institutional as well as moral support. In Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, it was the organizational structure of the church, as much as its vision of the promised land, that sustained the movement. The clergy provided indigenous leadership, and the churches served both as channels of communication and as sources of funds. During the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, the churches raised most of the money that sustained a carpool for twelve months. The success of the boycott also depended, initially at least, on the willingness of black cab companies to charge passengers the standard bus fare- a reminder that the black community had other institutional resources besides the church. It had stable families, businesses, newspapers, radio stations, and colleges; and enough buying power, in some localities, to make boycotts an effective economic weapon. “The Negro has enough buying power in Birmingham,’ King noted, ‘to make the difference between profit and loss in a business.’ He attributed the failure of his campaign in Albany, Georgia, partly to the community’s lack of economic leverage.

 

The movement achieved its greatest success wherever it could build on a solid foundation of indigenous institutions and on the middle class ethic of thrift and responsibility that made them work. Recognizing the importance of an institutional infrastructure in the struggle to achieve dignity and independence, King urged the black community to organized cooperative credit unions, finance companies, and grocery stores. Boycotts of segregated businesses, he pointed out, not only undermined segregation but encouraged Negro enterprise, bringing ‘economic self-help and autonomy to the ‘local community.’ He preached the dignity of labor and the need to achieve ‘painstaking excellence’ in the performance even of the humblest tasks. He reminded  his followers that too many black people lived beyond their means, spent money on ‘frivolities,’ failed to maintain high standards of personal cleanliness, drank to excess, and made themselves objectionable by ‘loud and boisterous’ behavior. ‘We must not let the fact that we are victims of injustice lull us into abrogating responsibility for our own lives.’ If he has been accused of upholding petty bourgeois values, King would have probably have taken the accusation as a compliment. He did not hesitate to call rock and roll as ‘totally incompatible’ with gospel music, on the grounds that it ‘often plunges men’s minds into degrading and immoral depths. Andrew Young did not misrepresent the civil rights movement when he describe it, ‘up until 1965, anyway,’ as ‘ really a middle-class movement,’ with ‘middle- class aspirations’ and a ‘middle-class membership,  .  .  . it was still essentially a middle-class operation.’

 

The movement drew its strength not only from the  lower-middle-class culture of Southern blacks but also from the regional culture of the South itself, to which it bore a complex and ambivalent relationship. Since the dominant view of the Southern way of life included a determination to keep the South a ‘white man’s country,’ the movement might have been expected to swear an eternal enmity to everything Southern. Instead it was informed by an understanding that the history of Southern blacks was intricately intertwined with that of their oppressors. Explaining his decision to return to the South after completing his studies in Boston, King spoke not only of a ‘moral obligation’ but of the positive attractions of the land of his youth. “The South, after all, was our home. Despite its shortcomings we loved it as a home and had a real desire to do something about the problems that we had felt so keenly as youngsters. In his famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, he declared his intention to ‘return to the South’ with his ‘dream’ of deliverance and racial brotherhood. Among the considerations that led to his decision to involve himself in the strike of garbage workers in Memphis, where he met his death in 1968, the one that laid most heavily, in all likelihood, was the plea of the civil rights workers there that King belonged in the South and the Southern blacks still believed in nonviolence. He always spoke of himself as a Southerner. In his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” he referred to ‘our beloved Southland.’ He honored the best in the Southern heritage and insisted that ‘we Southerners, Negro and white, must no longer permit our nation and heritage to be dishonored before the world.” The diehard segregationists, he claimed, did not represent the real South. ‘One day’, he said in the Birmingham letter, ‘the South will recognize its real heroes’- the ‘disinherited children of God’ who were standing up for what was best in the American dream.’

By addressing their oppressors not only as fellow sinners but also as fellow Southerners, King and his followers exposed the moral claims of the white supremacist regime in the South to the most damaging scrutiny; and the appeal to a common regional past was probably just as important, in the eventual victory over segregation, as the appeal to ‘profound and ultimate unities,’ in Niebuhr’s phrase. King always believed, even in the face of what must have seemed overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that ‘there are great resources of goodwill in the Southern white man that we must somehow tap.’ When Lyndon Johnson became president, it was important to King to point out that Johnson was a ‘fellow Southerner’ who was ‘concerned about civil rights.’ Sympathetic  Southern whites sensed that King spoke not only for black people but for the soul of the entire South. Hence the ‘admiration,’ as Lillian Smith told King, of ‘thousands of white Southerners’ for what he was doing.

Leslie Dunbar, a white participant in the civil rights movement, attended a White House reception for civil rights advocates, listened to the ‘Southern accents buzzing hungrily’ around a plate of barbecued ribs, and found himself touched by the ‘fraternity of white and black that for the moment makes every Northern white man and every Northern Negro .  .  . an outsider.’ With all her sins, Dunbar wrote, ‘the South inspired her sins and daughters, even her suffering black ones, to love her.’ Many white Southerners had come to love her, however, with an uneasy conscience, and King knew how important it was to keep up an unremitting pressure on the ‘conscience of the community.’ He did not expect segregationists to give up without a struggle, but neither did he expect the struggle to accomplish anything unless it was based on a ‘great moral appeal.’  That this appeal was not lost on those to whom it was immediately addressed – conscience-stricken Southern moderates – is indicated by a minister’s remark that white clergymen had become ‘tortured souls.’ Very few of them, he said, ‘aren’t troubled and don’t have admiration for King.” Dunbar described the civil rights advocates as ‘strange revolutionaries,’ who ‘come as defenders of the land and its values. They come, as one prominent white Southerner once put it to me, to give us back our country.’ The movement’s claims could be interpreted in this way only because it was able to recognize itself as the product of the culture it was seeking to change – the product, specifically, of the ‘characteristically theological cast of Southern thought,’ as Dunbar put it, with its habit of ‘seeing all lives as under the judgment of God and of knowing, therefore, with certainty the transience of all works of men.’ .  .  . Even in his harshest indictments of the United States, King invoked the Constitution and the Bible, embodiment of its shared political and religious traditions. “Our beloved nation,’ he said in 1967, when he finally began to show signs of running out of patience, ‘is still a racist country’; but it was beloved nevertheless.

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After ten years of successful agitation in the South, culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the movement rapidly disintegrated when it ventured into the North. The usual explanation of its failure in the North – that the struggle against legal discrimination in the South raised ‘clear and simple moral issues,’ in President Johnson’s words, whereas de facto discrimination could not be easily dramatized as a contest between good and evil – misses a good deal of the truth. No doubt the difficulty of staging the kind of confrontations that stirred up public opinion against Bull Connor, Sheriff Clark, and other symbols of Southern racism diminished the chances of attracting favorable attention from the media. The plight of the Northern ghettos, moreover, did not lend itself to simple legislative solutions. But a more important difference between the North and the South lay in the demoralized, impoverished condition of the black community in cities like Chicago, which could not support a movement that relied so heavily on a self-sustaining network of black institutions, a solidly rooted petty-bourgeois culture, and the pervasive influence of the church. The movement sought to give black people a new dignity by making them active participants into the struggle against injustice, but it could not succeed unless the materials of self-respect had already been to some extent achieved.

As he toured the Northern ghettos after the first wave of riots, in 1965, King was staggered by the desperate poverty he found, but he was even more discouraged  by the absence of institutions that would sustain the black community’s morale. He did not join the criticism directed by black militants and newly radicalized white liberals against the Moynihan Report, accused of shifting attention from poverty to the collapse of the family and thus of ‘blaming the victim’ for the sins of white oppression. ‘The shattering blows on the Negro family,’ he argued, ‘have made it fragile, deprived and often psychopathic  .  .  Nothing is so much needed as a secure family life for a people to pull themselves out of poverty and backwardness.” Institutional breakdown was a cause as well as a consequence of poverty, according to King. Whereas some observers  tried to picture the ghetto as a workable subculture, he took the position that ‘jammed up, neurotic, psychotic Negros’ in Northern cities  were ‘forced into violent ways of life.’ These conditions led him to demand the abolition of the ghetto through open-housing  ordinances and massive federal action against poverty. His advocacy of such programs constituted a tacit admission that the North lacked the stable black communities on which the civil rights movement rested in the South. Hosea Williams made the same point more openly. “I have never seen such hopelessness,’ he said after a moment in Chicago. ‘The Negroes of Chicago have a greater feeling of powerlessness than any I ever saw. They don’t participate in the governmental processes because they are beaten down psychologically. We’re used to working with people who want to be freed.’ This last remark summed up the contrast between the North and the South. . .

Once the scenes of his activities shifted to the North, he no longer addressed a constituency that cared to hear about self-help, the dignity of labor, the importance of strong families, and the healing power of agape; spiritual discipline against the power of resentment. According to black militants, honkies would listen only to gunfire and the sound of breaking glass. Faced with the boundless rage of the ghetto and the growing influence of leaders like H. Rap Brown, who urged blacks to arm themselves against a white war of extermination, King became increasingly discouraged and depressed. Towards the end of his life, he told Ralph Abernathy that ‘those of us who adhere to nonviolence’ might have to step aside and let the violent forces run their course.’

see also:

https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-new-segregation-by-ben-crump.html

 

https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2017/10/simone-weil-and-mlkjr-by-robert-coles.html

https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2015/05/formal-and-substantive-human-and-civil.html

 

Epilogue by Paul Klebnikov

 

A healthy state should not be confused with a powerful state. The U.S.S.R. was powerful but not healthy. Its power was based on fear, arbitrary rule, bureaucracy, corruption, lawlessness, and the absence of independent local governments or civic organizations. The Soviet Union’s terminal illness was the result of its failure, despite massive propaganda, to encourage a sense of duty or civic responsibility among both masses and the elite. It failed to produce citizens. Those who believe that a healthy state means a strong central government forget that the central government is merely the top of the pyramid. The foundation is a network of local governments and independent civic associations competing with the central government in addressing local and national needs. Without a broad foundation of such local and civic organizations, a strong central government is a fragile structure – a tall tower on a shallow base. The Soviet Union was such a structure. Over the course of seven decades, the Communist dictatorship destroyed churches, elected local governments, independent trade unions, professional associations, charitable organizations – all independent institutions, in other words, that could challenge the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. In the end, The U.S.S.R.  collapsed because of the hypertrophy of state power.

A healthy society can be defined by the strength of its system of values – a factor as important as it is difficult to measure. The nation that Boris Yeltsin inherited lacked the values that are the foundation of prosperity and democracy. How can private enterprise flourish when society is suffused with envy? How can the economy grow when the value of honest work is derided? How can democracy flourish when no one wants to take responsibility for the common good? The pervasive nihilism in Russia is the result of the Communist’ regimes destruction of such key building blocks of a healthy society as family, religion, and independent civic association. Boris Yeltsin’s Russia was not a nation of citizens, but a mass of fractured families and isolated individuals. Russians were subjects, not citizens.

The fact that Boris Yeltsin inherited an unhealthy state and an unhealthy society made it difficult for his reforms to succeed. Yet, Yeltsin and his ministers did little to address the problem. The Russian state grew more corrupt, more inefficient, more arbitrary in its exercise of power. Russian society grew even sicker than it had been under the Communists, there was a decline in both family values and the sense of civic responsibility. The disregard for the value of  human beings, already rampant under Communism, deepened under Yeltsin’s watch. Often it seemed that Russia’s perverted value system rewarded any activity that victimized one’s neighbor; this criminal mind-set become so dominant  that adhering to principles of honest, decency, or law-abidance became equivalent to moral dissent.

In the absence of either a healthy state or a healthy society, the application of such Western liberal principles as privatization and free prices  could only precipitate Russia’s destruction. While Chubais and other young reformers naively followed a lopsided version of the American model in macroeconomic policy (neglecting the role of good government and healthy social values in breeding America’s success), Russia’s businessmen were guided by a perverse understanding of American capitalism on the microeconomic level. Whenever I asked Russia’s business magnates about the orgy of crime produced by the market reforms, they invariably excused it by pointing to the robber baron of American capitalism. Russia’s bandit capitalism was no different than American capitalism in the late nineteenth century ,they argued.

Communist propaganda had always maintained that making money in a free market was a purely predatory and criminal activity. Soviet schoolchildren has been taught that the United States, as the paragon of capitalism, was controlled by a ruthless, superrich elite; they were taught that all the great financial and industrial empires powering the American  economy had immoral origins- behind every fortune was a legacy of theft, lies, even murder. The American captains of industry were little more than crooks and criminals. Russia’s new business magnates had all absorbed this image of Western Capitalism in school, when they went into business, they acted accordingly.

 

“Perhaps our criminals are the most powerful people in the country today, but this is just a phase, ’they would say. ‘Just like America. Look at all your great capitalists – Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Morgan: They all started out s criminals as well.’

The old American robber barons may have bent the rules, but they were neither criminals nor looters. On the contrary, the robber barons, whatever their moral flaws, helped turn the United States into the strongest industrial power in the world. They built railroads that opened up the country. Carnegie built the world’s largest steel industry. Rockefeller created the world’s largest oil industry. Ford invented a way to mass-produce automobiles for the American middle-class consumer. Morgan financed America’s industrialization and turned Wall Street into a market where small investors would not be defrauded. No, Berezovsky and is colleagues could in no way be compared to the robber barons of American history.

In its scale and rapaciousness, the looting of the state that took place during the Yeltsin regime was unprecedented – it was, perhaps, the robbery of the century. At the root of the disaster was the Russian penchant for playing the double game, for pursuing an essentially dishonest policy. This tendency to pay the double game was evident in the KGB’s willingness to finance organized-crime groups and the new commercial banks in  the 1980s in hopes of controlling them and prolonging the existence of the Soviet Union. It was also evident in the Yeltsin regime’s sponsorship of a handful of crony capitalists in hopes of using them to create a genuine free-market economy. It was evident in Russia’s long, tangled relationship with Chechnya.

The West, too, betrayed a penchant for the double game. The fact that the Yeltsin regime had turned into a gangster state was often blithely dismissed; Russia’s lawless market was described as ‘raw capitalism’ or ‘frontier capitalism,’ with the implicit analogy to the American nineteenth century. The Clinton Administration, in particular, while trumpeting the principles of democracy and the free market, repeatedly ignored the evidence that the Yeltsin regime was a kleptocracy. In 1998, a top Russia analyst at the CIA told the New York Times that the Clinton Administration routinely discouraged reports about the corruption of the Yeltsin regime. One such report about Prime Minister Chernomyrdin ( said by the CIA  to have amassed a personal fortune of $5 billion by 1996)  was returned by Vice President Al Gore with a ‘barnyard epithet’ scribbled across it. Thus self-delusion on the part of the Clinton Administration was confirmed in a 1999 article by Fritz Ermarth, a veteran CIA Russia hand and former chairman  of the National Intelligence Council. Ermarth spoke of American policy makers’ ‘disdain for analysis about the corruption of Russia politics and their Russian partners ‘ Ermarth attributes this primarily to the ‘warping of intelligence analysis to fit political agendas’ and to ‘a cynical Washington habit of .  .  .  Preserving the image of a foreign policy success.’

The U.S. government’s repeated praise of the Yeltsin regime as ‘democratic’ and ‘reformist’ damaged the liberal principles on which Western societies are based. The issue came to a head during the 1996 Russian presidential elections, when the Clinton Administration was faced with a choice of supporting either Yeltsin of the communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, who was said to represent a return to the Cold War past. There was no reason for the United States to support either one. When one is faced with a choice between two evils and not compelled to chose either one, the correct choice is to abstain. But the Clinton Administration abandoned the stated U.S. policy of staying aloof from other countries’ political processes and threw its weight behind Yeltsin, promoting his campaign with both rhetoric and money.

Berezovsky’s career in the 1990s undoubtedly was very exciting: All around him, history was being made – Communism was destroyed, the Soviet Union fell apart, democracy and free markets were proclaimed, huge fortunes were acquired. But what was left at the end of it all? Russia was ravaged and destroyed. Millions of Russians died premature deaths. Most of Berezovsky’s companions of the road ended up as nonentities, despised by their survivors.

Eventually, of course, Russia’s era of self-destruction will draw to a close and the nation will undertake the difficult task of rebuilding. Vladimir Putin may well be the man to accomplish this task. But first he will have to deal with the corruption and crony capitalism epitomized by Boris Berezoky.

Paperback Writer by Robert Polito

The crazy, capricious, cruel, and lost childhoods among the corpus of Jim Thompson ‘s corpus partake of the totalitarian  family cast that poet Randall Jarrel  termed ‘one of God’s concentration camps.’ Recollections of vicious beatings, abandonment, deprivation, ritual humiliation, and incest routinely rankle the childhood flashbacks in his novels. As do the subtler forms of what the analyst Leonard Shengold calls ‘soul murder’*: Critch King in King Blood is one of many Thomson scions  tormented by his failure to me his stern father’s ‘standards.’

Thompson’s novels engage the nuclear family principally in the act of detonation. An astonishing number of his characters are orphans .  .  .and the preponderance of the non-orphaned Thompson heroes grow up in single-parent household overseen by ineffective or brutish guardians.

Sons who can’t respect their fathers, sons who wish their fathers  dead, and self-proclaimed prodigies who strive to subvert their father’s place in their mothers’ lives and beds also stagger through Thompson’s books, by turns nursing and picking at their wounds. Others are denied all the succor of childhood and, emerging as doleful boy-men, remain stalled in a state of arrested development.

The Getaway ponders such glitches inside the family machinery with an urgency that resonates through the assaults on conventional values and privileged institutions in Thompson’s fiction. During a meditative passage on family and personality that his cousin Pauline Ohmart terms “Jimmie thinking about his father and his own life,’ Thompson writes of an ‘insecurity whose seeds are invariably planted earlier in under-or over-protectiveness, in a distrust of parental authority which becomes all authority.’

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The psychic stretch from the seventh grade of the one-building Burwell   school system to an aggressive urban high school in Fort Worth might have prove traumatic for any student. But Jimmie has sidestepped almost as much education  as he received, between shuffling back and forth from Oklahoma and Nebraska and the classes lost to planting and harvesting the Myers farm. The happy evenings in Uncle Bob’s library and his father’s Spartan drills afforded him a precocious erudition without actually establishing the foundation for high school. As Jimmie rued in Bad Boy, ‘I has read voraciously and far in advance of my years. But I was sadly unprepared for the inelastic high school curriculum.’





In the Twenties Thompson became a habitué of the hobo jungles at the the edges of the teeming rag-towns and company camps that attended the sudden discovery of petroleum. Hobohemia was a complex and highly politicized social institution with its own unwritten system of laws, etiquette, mores, and division of of labor. Although ‘Tramp” and ‘bum’ were sanctioned synonyms, ‘hobo’ specifically designated a wandering laborer (the word probably derives from ‘hoe boy’, a seasonal farm worker). A catalyst for hobo culture and traditions, the jungles operated as nomadic democracies, welcoming all arrivals regardless of race, nationality or personal past. As migrant workers, the Texas hoboes affiliated with the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World. IWW publicity touted the itinerate bindle stiffs as ‘the guerrillas of the revolution’ and remarked that the nomadic worker of the West embodied the very spirit of the IWW. His cheerful cynicism, his frank and outspoken contempt for most of the conventions of bourgeois society, including the more stringent conventions which masquerade under the name of morality, make him admirable exemplar of the iconoclastic doctrine of revolutionary unionism.’  The more stable jungles sometimes excluded any oil tramp not carrying a red IWW membership card.

Jim signed on with the Wobblies shortly after his arrival in West Texas. The celebrated ‘shock troops of labor,’ the IWW concluded their brief Preamble with a blunt call for militant action: ‘It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized not only for the everyday struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall be overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of a new society within the shell of the old.’

 

It was Harry “Haywire’ McClintock( Strawlegs Martin, in several of Jim’s short stories), the notorious Wobbly busker, who finally persuaded Thompson to leave the oil fields of Texas and get on with his life and education. That education turned out to be as itinerate as the rest of Jim’s life and he ended up in the late twenties in the grueling job of a hotel bell boy in Fort Worth, supporting his extended family. Excluding gratuities Jim’s wages never exceeded $14; one happy night Will Rogers tipped him $50 dollars for retrieving his car. Seeking to overcome the fresh degradation and torments of the Depression Thompson then orchestrated a family cottage industry  from the contentious duplex called true crime. Chained to Fort Worth  by his hotel schedule, he sent Birdie, Freddie and Alberta out scouring the state for sensational murders he could write up for the fact-detective monthlies.

 

From the catchpenny broadsides hawked in the London streets of Elizabethan England to the current boffo true crime dramatic reenactment television programs, America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries, so-called murders for the millions have enjoyed a continuous, if often clandestine, run. Eighteenth-century Grub Street hacks cooked up cheap biographies of celebrated thieves and murderers, while The Newgate Calendar (first issue in 1773 and steadily expanded into the next century) disseminated the latest trials and executions. Richard Altick, perhaps the foremost scholar of nineteenth-century popular culture, focused on the subterranean persistence of the publication of violent crime for his Victorian Studies in Scarlet:

Their popularity in the pre-Victorian decades was a modest but unmistakable indication of the increasing and enduring taste for tales of fatal violence which was about to be so memorably exploited .  .  . The passion for real-life murder was most unapologetically manifest among ‘millions’, as the Victorians called the working class, but it prevailed as well by the firesides of the middle class and sometimes, though rather more covertly, in the stately halls of the aristocracy .  .  .

‘Real-life murder’ penetrated the American mainstream in 1924. Bernarr Macfadden – a physical cultist, sex lecturer, newspaper-and-magazine magnate, occasional presidential candidate –adapted the confessional formulas of his best-selling True Story and created True Detective Mysteries. Circulation  spiraled towards a stunning two million readers. During the peak period- roughly 1935 to 19445, also the peak period for Thompson’s involvement –True Detective presided as the premier publication in a dense field. As many as seventy-five different fact-detective monthlies heaped the nation’s newsstands. Macfadden led the pack with True Detective and Master Detective. Wilford H. ‘Captain Billy’ Fawcett followed with Daring Detective, and Front Page Detective; and Arnold Kruse’s Detective Publishing Company of Chicago rounded out a prestigious (and high-paying) triumvirate with Official Detective, Actual Detective, and Intimate Detective.

“For years I wrote for every magazine in the true crime field, Thompson later told Joan Kahn, his editor at Harper and Brothers Publishers for Nothing More Than Murder. Family and friends recall him appearing constantly  in dozens of fact-detective monthlies through out the 1930s and 1940s  .  .  . Thompson’s unique apprenticeship inside the more lurid lowlife real-life murder pulp publishing world inescapably stamped his mature crime fiction work.

By 1938 Thompson began to voice reservations about the New York City leftist literary vanguard. To a fellow Party member and associate from the New Deal’s  Oklahoma Writers Project, during a rare recorded declaration of his ambitions Thompson declared,  ‘No more of that esoteric shit from now on I’m going to write about life as it is. I’ll show those motherfuckers!’ He used words like ‘earthy,’ ‘sexy’ and ‘violent’ to characterizer the novel’s he envisioned. But as Gordon Friesen expounded, Thompson’s objectives were fiercely double-edged: he aspired to be at once more popular and more subversive. “Jim was fed up with not making a living. He spoke of writing for money by talking about what people wanted to read, sex and violence. But he also wanted to be truer to his own life, and to life as he had seen it. The heroic Party line became something of a straightjacket for Jim, as far as his writing was concerned.’

Thompson probably resisted Bill Cunningham and Vanguard Press because his new novel, despite his apparent flirtation with TASS, would record his break with the Communist Party. His title, Now and on Earth, in fact derived from a poignant scene where he directly challenged Karl Marx.

As San Diego ‘hack-writer and aircraft flunky’ James  Dillon comforts his young daughter Shannon. Thomson performed an autopsy upon the American Dream, assailing in the same breath both God and the God that failed:

 

.  .  .oh, Christ, as she lies here in my arms, exhausted but afraid to sleep, living on hatred, even the thought that we did not want her makes me feel like a criminal. And I am not. And Robert is not. We wanted Jo, and we wanted Shannon, and we wanted Mack. Six in all, we had dreamed of; and a big white house with a deep lawn and many bedrooms and a pantry that was always full. We wanted them, but we wanted that, too. Not for ourselves, but for them. We wanted it because we knew what it would mean if we didn’t have it. I knew how I was, and Roberta knew how she was. And we knew how it would be: As it had been with us,.

We did want her. Goddamnmit, I say we did! We want her now,. I was crazy to say that we didn’t or hadn’t. But we are getting tired, and we are so cramped, and there are so many things to be done.
Why? I ask, why is it like this? Not for Roberta, not for myself; but for all of us.

Why, Karl? And what will you do about it? Not twenty years from now when Shannon and all the Shannons have bred, and a plague spreads across the land, and brother slays brother.

Not then, when it is too late, but now!

And you, God? What have you to offer? Sweet music? Pie in the sky? Yes. But, on earth .  .  . ?

Now and on Earth?


Thompson called himself a Socialist for at least another decade. The bloodline of his 1930s Marxism circulates through all his subsequent fiction. His crime novels routinely appropriate the lingua franca of alienation. ‘In a sense  they were an autonomous body,’ he comments of some migrant farmworkers in The Getaway, ‘functioning within a society which was organized to grind them down. For Texas by the Tail he laments ‘the cruel shearing away of all but the utterly practical, as pastoral man was caught up in an industrial society.’ Where Marx rued the powerlessness of ‘mechanized man, Dolly Dillon of A Hell of a Woman says, ‘I was like a mechanical man with the batteries run down.” And, as suggested earlier, the Marxist concept of self-alienation infused the chilling split  narration of A Hell of a Woman, The Killer Inside Me, and Savage Night, among other crime novels. Thompson continued to write political fiction all his life. Animated by his rock-ribbed sympathy for those the system didn’t work for, his books root through the dark patches of American experience undermining privileged institutions and values .  .  .  The recurrent surname ‘Dillon,’ his Party alias, itself lodged a silent homage to his Communist past. But the utopian uplift of the dialectic and a purely economic interpretation of society no longer satisfied him.

Thompson’s novels look back to the marginal men of the 1930s, but they belong to the 1950s. ‘These have been the years of conformity and depression,’ Norman Mailer rumbled in ‘The White Negro,’ the essay that popularized the hipster as psychopath. ‘The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it .  .  . if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?’ Against the Eisenhower grin and the confident smiles of corporate advertisements, Thompson pronounced a negation, a refusal, picking out- and picking away at – a culture of loss, alienation, hopelessness and failure. Against the suburban utopia of Father Knows Best –the long-running television series introduced the same season as The Nothing Man- he lanced a boil on the American Dream, flaunting a nightmare family of feeble, abusive fathers, suffocating mothers, martinet wives, impotent husbands, and incestuous siblings.  The 1950s forged a complex, multifaceted decade, resistant to tidy encapsulation. Soon after the turn of the half-century, ‘psycho’ serial killers – a boy-next-door spree gunman like Charlie Starkweather, or a wisecracking cannibal like Ed Gein – made news and myth, their crimes spurring a media folklore of movies, books and songs. Thompson’s novel join, even anticipate, such quintessential violations of the “Silent Generation’ decorum as William Burrough’s Junky, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, Robert Frank’s The Americans, Laslo Benedeck’s The Wild One, Nicholas Ray’s  Rebel Without a Cause, and thhe rock ‘n’ roll of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley. Thompson’s novel’s of the 1950s sold out their printings of 200,000 to 250,000 copies. His novels were celebrated in the New York Times Book Review.

But nineteen sixty-one and sixty-two were misplaced years for Jim Thompson. New American library had turned against him, and stranded without a market for new novels, he wasn’t producing any.. . Jim convalesced from his death bed bout with bleeding ulcers – after a fashion. ‘One day I came home,’ Sharon relates, ‘and he was sitting in a chair with a cigar in his hand and a drink by the chair. The doctor had told him he couldn’t ever smoke or drink again, and I had an absolute conniption fit. Daddy calmed me down and said, ‘It’s a cigar not a cigarette.’

During these lost days and weeks Thompson lived off the sale of foreign  rights to his old novels. The advances might oscillate – Gallimard in France, for instance, paid $770, minus commissions, for The Getaway. Kadokawa Shoten in Japan paid $1,500, and Gyldendall in Norway just $200 – yet he had rolled up so many books, and the allure of American hard-boiled  fiction abroad flamed so intensely that Thompson was cashing monthly checks for subsidiary rights.

He entered the ragged pantheon of American artists – descending from Poe to David Goodis Horace McCoy, Chester Himes, Sidney Bechet, Samuel Fuller, Memphis Slim, Joseph Losey and Nicholas Ray – revered as prophets in France while annexed to obscurity at home. Not every imported Gallic fancy is a Jerry Lewis or Mickey Rourke. Starting in 1950 with the translation of Nothing More than Murder, Gallimard released nine novels for Série Noire during the author’s lifetime and, unlike his stateside houses, kept them in print. Gallimard honored Thompson in 1966 by selectin Pop.1280 as the thousandth title to carry the Série Noire imprint. Scarcely two years after his death the Parisian journal Polar would commit an entire issue to a discussion of his life and work. And, as noted earlier, a French critic proclaimed Thompson ‘one of the great American writers of the twentieth century’ and the greatest author of serie noire.’ French directors have styled the most sympathetic and resonant adaptations of Thompson’s novels for film- Alain Corneau in 19789 with Serie Noire **(from A Hell of a Woman) and Bertrand Tavernier in 1981 with Coup de Torchon ( Pop. 1280); Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard also expressed in shooting a Thompson film.

 

Thompson’s last novels, written in the early 70s were not big successes. White Mother, Black Son, even more than King Blood, shows Thompson struggling to roll over his obsessions into a new, more permissive era. His twisted riffs on motherhood, Black Power, Indians, sex, student demonstrations, education, Freudian psychology, marriage, the police or Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? suggest an epic Lenny Bruce routine but without the comedian’s wit and timing. The hip patter, topical satire and ricocheting profanity sound affected and desperate, a psychedelic rinse over his tired palette.

From The Killer Inside Me through Pop. 1280 Thompson cooked the boldest novels from inside an atmosphere of cultural and private censorship. As William Carlos Williams – a poet whose work he assigned to his USC fiction students – once remarked of Poe, he ‘could not have written a word without the violence of expulsive emotion combined with the in-driving force of a crudely repressive environment.’ Thompson  at his best operated by indirection, stealth and subversion.


* https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ww3v7x
** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXdNc76aPVc