Enemy of the State by George Scialabba

The facts of  Stone’s life have been told well and often, most recently by D. D. Gutttenplan in American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone. He was born on Christmas Eve 1907, in Philadelphia, and christened Isadore  Feinstein. His parents had a dry goods store, which prospered modestly during Izzy’s boyhood and adolescence, and his cheerful, bustling mother adored him. He was inordinately bookish, starting very young. ( and continuing throughout his life – he was, for what it’s worth, far more literate, in his unostentatious way, than William F. Buckley Jr.) But he didn’t care much for school or succeed at it very well. He was also moonlighting from schoolwork as a reporter for local newspapers, and after a year he left college to work full-time as a journalist. He never looked back, at least until retirement, when he learned Greek, investigated Socrates, and discovered that that universally revered martyr for free speech was actually a good deal more hostile to democratic freedoms in Athens than most of Senator McCarthy’s victims were to democratic freedoms in America.

Neither Stone’s inner nor his outer life seems to have been particularly  complex or dramatic. He was a dutiful son: when his father’s business suffered in the Depression and his mother intermittently became mentally ill, Izzy, who was well paid by then, helped. He met a lively, popular girl, not much given to reading but much taken with his ebullience; they stayed happily married for sixty years. He was an enthusiastic and good-humored but often distracted father. He had few but loyal friends, was close to his siblings and on good terms with his relatives and in-laws, and- especially during his years in Washington D. C. – was not much of a party-goer. He led a full life, professionally and domestically, with few storms, and had a sunny and feisty personality, with few shadows or enigmas. The one moment of high drama was his decision in 1953, amid the ostracism which followed his fierce denunciation of the Smith Act and the publication of The Hidden History of the Korean War, to found I. F. Stone’s Weekly. A lesser man would have folded his tent, or at least lowered his voice.

 

Stone was cursed all his life with interesting times, boiling over with warm, depression, revolution, and totalitarianism. He covered these calamities not on the scene but behind the scenes, where policy was made. Some journalists could bring political action to life, Stone was one of the few who could bring political causation to life. He read official reports, studies, speeches, press conferences, congressional testimonies, and budget documents, voraciously, analytically, skeptically. He found the threads, connected the dots, and brought the substructure of real causes and motives to light.

An early example, which made Stone’s reputation in Washington, was his coverage of American unpreparedness for World War II. Long after it became obvious that US involvement in the war was likely, American industry simply could not stoop doing business with fascist Germany and Japan, even in strategic commodities like oil, rubber, metals, minerals, chemicals, and machine parts. The trade was too profitable, and the ties between German cartels (by then the arm of the Nazis regime) and American banks, corporations, and law firms ( including Sullivan & Cromwell, where John Foster Dulles represented a great many German clients) were too close. Stone tracked down the figures of industry after industry and hammered away at the story until even the Senate committee investigating war preparedness commended him. The additional German and Japanese war production enabled by the delivery of these materials may well have cost  the lives of thousands of American and Allied soldiers- more damage, in all likelihood, than was caused by Communist infiltrators in the State Department.

Equally important were Stone’s reports on how greed  and incompetence retarded American industry’s conversion to wartime production. General Motors could not be induced to stoop making cars in record numbers even after its factories and workforce were needed for tank, truck, and aircraft production. Alcoa Aluminum would not increase supply of this vital component for fear than an early end to the war would result in a surplus, hence lower prices. Major oil companies would not open their pipelines to independents; and in general, dominant companies would not cooperate with smaller rivals. All this profitable foot dragging was aided and abetted by the ‘dollar-a-year men,’ the business executives and corporate lawyers ‘loaned’ to the federal government in order to keep an eye out for the interests of their employers and clients. These, of course, were precisely the ‘responsible’ people, the men of substance- bankers, executives, and lawyers, along with professional diplomats and military officers – to whom Walter Lippmann proposed entrusting real power in a democracy, while the fickle public meekly registered its preferences every four years and hoped for the best.

Another high profile demolition was Stone’s reconstruction of the Gulf of Tonkin episode. Which had prompted Congress to authorize the use of force against North Vietnam. Piecing together information from Senate and UN debates and from European and Vietnamese news reports, Stone showed that the official account was false. The US boats deliberately entered what they knew the North Vietnamese claimed a territorial waters; they were supporting, perhaps directing, a South Vietnamese military operation against the North; there was no second attack on the boats, as claimed; and the Pentagon had detailed plans already drawn up for the extensive bombing reprisals that followed the North Vietnamese ‘attack’ (which in any case had caused no injuries or damage), suggesting that the US was hoping for, if not actually attempted to provoke an  incident.

As with the Korean War fourteen years earlier, Stone was virtually alone at the time in challenging a misleading official justification for an undeclared war. And one again, millions of lives were lost because Congress and the press were not as conscientious as he was.

Far more than a few million lives would have been lost in case of a nuclear war, and Stone was rightly obsessed with the arms race. It was plain to him that the US remained far ahead of the USSR through most of the nuclear era and could have had afar-reaching arms-control agreement at virtually any time. It was equally plain that the prospect of ‘limited nuclear war’ adumbrated in Henry Kissinger’s influential Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy was ‘poisonously delusive.’ And amid much high-mined hand-wringing about the malignant but mysteriously self-sustaining momentum of the arms race, Stone kept pointing out the extent to which it was not some tragic  historical imperative but rather sheer, unstoppable bureaucratic self-aggrandizement by the armed services that drove the progress of weapons technology.

To expose corporate fraud, diplomatic obfuscation, budgetary sleight-of-hand, and wartime propaganda required investigative enterprise for which Stone is renowned. To write about two of his other preoccupations, the internal security panic of the Truman era and the struggle for racial equality in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, required only common decency – as uncommon n these cases as in most others.. Stone harried – there is no other word for it- Senator McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. “Melodramatic bunk by a self-dramatizing dick’ was his entirely  typical comment on a speech by Hoover to the American Legion, and he was hardly less scathing about McCarthy. Stone had his reward: The FBI read his mail, searched his garbage, tapped his phone, and monitored his public appearances, while the State Department denied him a visa and tried to confiscate his passport- marks of distinction not granted to his more cautious colleagues. About race, Stone simply said the obvious – the now-obvious, that is – repeatedly and eloquently. His columns on the subject are still bracing.

Stone was ardent Zionist in the 1940s and was the first American journalist to report on the Jewish exodus from Europe and the creation of the State of Israel. In 1944 he penned an open letter to American newsmen urging pressure on President Roosevelt to admit more displaced Jews into the United States, which would not only have saved many Jewish lives but might have also greatly reduced tensions in post-war Palestine. In 1945, when it was still feasible, he advocated a bi-national Arab-Jewish state. Beginning immediately after the 1948 war, he pleaded for a swift resettlement of Palestinian refugees. Immediately after the 1967 war, he warned Israel against occupying the West Bank and Gaza. Right from the start –and even before- he was right about Israel / Palestine.

Above all, he was right about the Cold War. He ridiculed the notion that the Soviet Union, bled dry by World War II, was poised to overrun Western Europe, or that it controlled every popular movement from Latin America to the Balkans to the Middle East to Southeast Asia. And he pointed out how much US-Soviet tension was the result of America’s insistence on rearming West Germany and integrating it into a hostile European military alliance. The cornerstone of Cold War ideology- that US actions were primarily reactive and defensive, dictated by unrelenting Soviet aggressiveness – took no account of Stalin’s fundamental conservatism or of American designs on Mideast oil or on Southeast Asians markets for its Japanese ward. Nor did allow Americans to perceive how arrogant and threatening the rest of the world considered America’s claim that Taiwan was our ‘first line of defense,’ a notion Stone set up superbly in a satire, The Chinese 7^th Fleet in Long Island Sound.’ Finally, Stone recognized the role of defense spending in America’s economic management, both as a subsidy for advanced technology and as a fiscal stimulus that entailed no government competition with private producers- what would later be called ‘military Keynesianism.’

All governments lie, Stone reminded his readers, and none act morally except when forced to by an aroused public. This moral universalism is his most valuable legacy. It is true that Stone worked harder than most other journalists and hobnobbed less. But what set him apart was something else: that he applied to his own government the same moral standards we all unhesitatingly apply to others. No reporter would accept at face value a Communist or even a non-Communist government’s account of its own motives and intentions. Japan’s insistence that it sought only to bring prosperity and order to the rest of East Asia in the 1930s, or the USSR’s protestations that it invaded Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan at the request of their legitimate governments to save those countries from subversion by international capitalist conspiracy, were met with ridicule or simply ignored in favor of explanations based on Japanese or Soviet self-interest, an in particular on the interests of their ruling elites. But vey few journalists were equally skeptical ( in public, that is) about the motives of American intervention in Indochina, Central America, or the Middle East. Those actions may have been deemed imprudent for one reason or another; criticism in this vein was ‘responsible.’ But to question Americas good intentions – to assume that the US is as capable of aggression, brutality, and deceit as every other state, and that American policy, like that of every other state, serves the purposes of those with preponderant domestic power rather than a fictive ‘national interest,’ much less a singular idealism – was to place oneself beyond the pale. Then as now, such skepticism was the operative definition of ‘anti-Americanism.’ By that definition Stone was anti-American, and America badly needs more such enemies.

 

Spyros Skouras by Arthur Miller

 

Once again Twentieth Century Fox mysteriously reached into my life; Spyros Skouras paid us a surprise visit the evening before I left for Washington, in a try at getting me to cooperate with the Committee. He had called from Hollywood to ask Marilyn if he could stop by as soon as he got to New York. I knew what this meant, of course, since the president of Twentieth Century Fox was not in the habit of making such flying visits, not to see Marilyn, at any rate, when the studio was still at odds with her. He would be trying to get me to avoid a possible jail term for contempt of Congress. Not that I mattered to him, but if rumors that we were going to marry were true, the patriotic organizations might well decide to picket her films. Such were the times. If there was any surprise in his phoning, it was that he had not done so earlier. He was reputed to have worked over many an actor and director with his persuasive mixture of real conviction, paternalism, and the normal show business terrors of bad publicity.

When she returned to me from the phone, I must have looked disconcerted at her announcement that it was Skouras, for she quickly asked me not to refuse to see him. And this was curious.

By turns she resented him, hated him, and spoke of him warmly as a friend of last resort at the studio. Although she was furious at his denying her the ordinary perquisites of a great star, which she was unquestionably at this time – the best dressing room, her choice of cameraman and director, and the respect due her as by far the public’s favorite performer- she could still be moved by his repeated reassurances, often accompanied by actual tears, that she was closer to him than even his own adored daughter. At the same time she was sure it was his obduracy that denied her recognition as the number one Fox draw.

The company insisted on binding her to her old contract, which paid her one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a picture, a fraction of her market value even at that time. This was a figure negotiated before her amazing cult had formed and the studio’s profits from her pictures had commenced soaring. But despite everything, her resentment lost its steam when Skouras took her by the arm and said, ‘You are my daughter.’ I was encouraged when she felt warmly toward him; we were to be married soon, and I found myself welcoming any of her feelings that were at all positive and unworried. In any case, it would be up to me how to respond to Skouras, and about that I had no uncertainty, although his coming increased my uneasiness that my public condemnation might harm her career.

Spyros Skouras, I estimated then, might bean eel but was not really a bad fellow because his deviousness was obvious enough to be almost reassuring. One never had the slightest doubt where he stood- right next to Power. If he indulged in passionate self-promoting speeches about honor, compassion, and truth, it was much in the Mediterranean or more specifically, the Achillean tradition of rhetorical excess accompanying all of life’s grand shifts, such as weddings and births –especially of boy babies – as well as the more stunning betrayals that Power periodically necessitates. I has met Skouras a few times before, but only once  when I could watch him in full rhetorical flight, and I never forgot it.

One afternoon five years earlier, I had happened to meet Kazan a few yards from the Fox building on Forty-sixth Street, where he had an appointment with Skouras. He invited me to join him, and having nothing better to do, I agreed. Kazan was still in the early stage of his movie directing career and was excited about the work; his fellow Greek Skouras was his friend, boss, and godfather.

Skouras’s office was about the size of a squash court, with the entire wall at one end covered by a map of the world as a backdrop for the coffin-like executive desk in front of it. On the map, Latin America was some ten feet long and the other continents proportionately immense, all marked wit many large red stars where Fox offices were located. Alone on the desk top of beige marble a low baroque statuette supported a golden pen and pencil.

On a  hassock at the foot of this desk sat George Jessel, then in his fifties, who greeted Kazan and me with both his hands wrapped around each of ours in turn. At a wave of Skouras’s hand we sat on beige sofas from whose deep, downy cushions  it was nearly impossible to rise again.

For no reason I could imagine, Skouras, from a standing star behind his desk, launched – in a hoarse, shouting voice that seemed to dress several thousand people in his mind – into a tirade against Franklin Roosevelt, who by then was already six years dead. Slapping the stone desk top with the palm of his hand for emphasis, occasionally throwing his head back defiantly or shaking his finger at Kazan, apparently in reprimand, he portrayed the late president as a man without honor, decency, or courage.

   ‘He was terrible!’ Jessel suddenly piped up from his hassock in front of the desk.

   ‘He was not terrible, he was a goddamned sonabitch!’

   ‘That bastard,” Jessel concurred, shaking his head angrily with a glance over at Kazan and me as though something had to be done immediately about this vile person. “I could tell you things, Spyros, that you .  .  .’

   ‘You don’t known nothing! I know!

   ‘I know you know, Spyros, but I was in Des Moines once when he .  . 

   ‘Don’t tell me Des Moines!’ Skouras commanded in outrage’

‘This man sold out million pipple to Stalin! He was agent of Stalin! He was absolutely agent!’ And he slammed his desk.

   ‘He was worse than an agent!’ Jessel yelled, thrilling himself visibly.

Now without the slightest warning or tonal change or shift of emphasis, Skouras declared, his head thrown back pridefully, ‘Without Franklin Roosevelt the United States would have been revolution in spring of 1935. He saved America!’

   ‘Goddamned right! Jessel shouted, likewise without so much as an eye-blink at this abrupt reversal. ‘Chrissake,’ he amplified in pity-filled tones, ‘people were starving, dying in the streets .  .  .’

Skouras now soared into praise of Roosevelt with encomia worthy of a graveside while tears of mourning bubbled up along the lower lids of Jessel’s eyes, and shaking his head, he added his loving recollections of the dead president’s fineness of character, his humor and generosity. It took me some weeks to realize that Skouras relished this performance as his way of informing Kazan, and perhaps me as well, that his power was so immense that he could blatantly contradict himself in front of us without losing one ounce of his domination. He was a bull walrus in the beach, just howling his joy of life to the sun.

When I opened our apartment door to let Skouras in, I saw that he was tired, a weary old man in a dinner jacket. He may also have had a drop too much. His handshake was limp, and he let his gaze slip across my face without his usual electric greeting, as though he did not expect much from the evening. A bald man with a deep chest and a bull neck, he stood titled slightly to the rear of his center of gravity, back straight and chin tucked in like a boxer’s. He could smile warmly while his eyes darted about for signs of the enemy. Marilyn immediately came into the foyer, and they embraced, almost tearfully on his part, probably because of all the favors he had had to deny her. ‘Won’erful, won’erful,’ he kept repeating with his eyes closed, his nose in her hair.

She was moved, surprisingly so. But I did not know then how aged men often evoked in her so intense an awareness of her own power over them that it turned to pity within her and sometimes even love. Her nearness could make such men actually tremble. And this was more security for her than in a vault full of money or a theater echoing with applause.  Holding her hand to his lips, Skouras took her to the couch and sat beside her, but she immediately sprang up and insisted on getting him a cognac, which he accepted despite his asthmatic protests and sipped. Beside him on the couch again with her knees drawn up, she faced him with her upper lip ever so slightly flicking like the lip of a bridled horse, a prideful tic of self-possession. He could not have helped being struck by her beauty in a beige satin blouse with high Byronic collar and a tight white skirt and sparkling patent leather spiked heels. It had been months since he had seen her, time enough to have forgotten the impact of the force wave that her beauty seemed to displace.

Sitting on one cheek like an awkward circus bear, he kept sliding off the couch cushion as with his rather adolescently charming hoarseness he touched on the illnesses and deaths of mutual Hollywood friends, problems with his Rye estate, and developments in his daughter’s life. Marilyn was charmed and happy as emotion alone could make her happy, almost without regard for its hostile of benevolent significance, for only in emotion was there truth. Incredibly now he began pleading with her to renounce her own company and return to the studio, something that had been settled by contract almost a year before, but she understood the diversion – he ha come with something  difficult for him to say, and this roundabout way of getting down to business, absurd as it was, showed a certain respectful deference that moved her to listen and react as though he were talking about something real.

‘Hones-to-Gah-dahlin, I worry about you personally. I can’t help what some of those people out there doin’ to you these years, I’m not Twentieth, I’m only the president. I am speakin’ to you from my heart. I promise you gonna be happy again with Twentieth. I’m absolutely serious, Mahlin dahlin’, you make such a mistake, come back with us we are your own family, you fadder and mudder. ‘ On he went, like certain fish who spray an alkali before laying their eggs in acidic waters. Now he talked of his cathedral, which he had built in Los Angeles for the Greek Orthodox Church, the pride of his life. You could hate Spyros, but you had to like him, if only for the naiveté of his disregard for the truth, which was at least not surgical and dry but had a certain ardor: he always meant what he said while he was saying it.

Out of the blue, he took Marilyn’s hand, and with an envelopment of privacy between them he asked, ‘You in love, switthar?’
She seemed to fill up, caught a breath, and nodded that she was.

  ‘You sure?’
Not without guilt she confronted him eye to eye, he who knew her story, and nodded again.
‘Gah-bless-you won’erful,’ he said, patting he hand with fatherly benediction; if it was really love and marriage, especially the latter, then God ha entered the case and the fooling around was over. Skouras sat there nodding in active calculation as he studied  her short black shoe on the carpet. Turning to me, he said, ‘Gah-bless-you Artr-won’erful. I know you a fine man, you goin’ take good care this girl, she’s like my own daughter, hones-to Gah.’

Now that he had to believe we were not merely shacking up, the Company was inevitably and menacingly involved. With two pictures still owing them before she was totally free, her marrying at all was bad enough for her image of sexual availability, but to marry me in my situation was disaster.

He sighed. ‘Artr, I hopin’ very much you not goin’ to make some terrible mistake with the Committee.’

I had every reason to think he would carry back to the Committee whatever I said, so I could only shrug and mutter something about doing what I thought was right.

He came wide awake now, watching for my reaction. ‘I know these congressmen very well, Artr, we are good friends. They are not bad men, they can be reasonable. I believe personally, Artr, that in your case they would take you privately in executive session, you understand? No necessity to be in public at all, I can arrange this if you tell me.’

In the code of the hour this meant that in exchange for ‘clearing’ myself by naming names and engaging in the formula of obeisance to the Committee, such as publicly thanking the members for helping me find my way back to America, I would be questioned in camera, spared an open hearing.

‘I’m against the Committee, Spyros. How can I come out and thank them for anything?’

Mixed into my response I heard ‘Socrates,’ and when I finished he said, ‘You must read this man’s book.’

“Socrates! Spyros, Socrates was condemned by the same kind of committee .  .  . .?

“Yes, but he had the courage to say what he thinks, Artr.’

For a moment this had me puzzles, until I realized  that he meant I should use the hearing to declare my differences with the left and the liberals, an ‘attack’ on my part that would take the sting out of my caving in to the Committee. It was more or less what Odets had been beguiled into doing, and something he never ceased regretting to he last day of his life.

‘I don’t need a congressional committee to give me a platform to attack the left, Spyros, I can do that on my own time.’ Privately I thanked my stars that I worked in the theater, where there was no blacklist; a as a film writer, I would now be kissing my career goodbye.

Getting up with his finger pointed to the ceiling, he tried to seem propelled by burning conviction, but repetition, I judged, had emptied his speech of real feeling. “Stalin’, he began, ‘crucified the Grik pipple, Artr. I know what I’m talking about! The Grik Communist Party made civil war, torture, and shootin’ pipple.’

.  .  .  And he poured out a knowledgeable capsulized  history of the post-war Greek political catastrophe between the right and the left, naturally with all of the blame on the latter and all of the good with the former. But even if I had known or been able to acknowledge the truth of the left’s brutality at the time, it would not have changed what I saw as the issue in 1956, and that was the manifestly anti-democratic contempt for basic American rights on the part of the Committee, something impossible to support.

“It’s out of the question, Spyros, I can’t do it. I don’t like those people.

How the rage hit me or what exactly triggered it I could never recall later, but in his persistence I felt myself cornered, it was as though he was trying to exercise control over my work, and it was intolerable. I got off only a sentence or two, but he quickly caught the idea and held up both his hands and went to his coat, which was lying over the back of a chair, and incredibly enough, I was sure I heard him mutter, ‘You are Socrates.’ He embraced Marilyn again ,but now with real sadness, and I walked him out to the elevator. By the time it arrived he was his earlier sleepy self, and his last glance towards me as he disappeared behind the closing door was forgetful, as though I was a complete stranger he had met in the building corridor, for he was not a man to waste emotions.

Marilyn was sipping scotch when I got back, in a mood of uncertainty; I felt he had moved her, not by his argument but by his feeling, for in some crazy way he did care about her. A few years later, Skouras would invite her to sit at the main table when Nikita Khrushchev visited the studio, presenting her to him as a great star. The Soviet chairman was very obviously smitten with her, and she in turn like him for his plainness. Spyros then declaimed, for the thousandth time, the epic story of how he and his brother had arrived in America with a few carpets on their backs as their only capital  and now he was president of Twentieth Century Fox, such was the reality of opportunity in America. Khrushchev got up and countered that he was the son of a poor coal miner and was now the headman of the whole Soviet Union. Marilyn thought that a fantastic reply; like her, Khrushchev was odd man out.

 

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