Health and the Poverty Line

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 1-3

“The curse of poverty,” wrote Martin King in 1967, “has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.” In 1964, the U.S. poverty rate was 19 percent. Relatively good economic times and War on Poverty programs dropped the rate to 11 percent by 1973. Today, it is more than 14 percent for the nation as a whole, and 16 percent in the South. Given the current economic situation, these rates are almost certain to continue to move upward. With the coming and going of another set of Census Bureau statistics, the early 1990s finds us cruel and blind as ever, still given to picking our teeth with the bones of the poor.

For many observers of the recent South, it’s become a truism that this section of America has finally integrated itself within the nation and the national economy. Perhaps. But only if you imagine a national economy that is itself pocketed with affluent white suburbs here, shut-down factories and underclass ghettos there, and forgotten-about rural hinterlands forever beyond the horizon.

Actually, the South today continues in many ways its tradition of distinctiveness. Any listing of the “worst states” according to current measurements of poverty, health care, housing, workers’ climate, concern for the environment and general quality of life continues to be disproportionately Southern.

Poverty in the South of the 1990s exacts its cruelest costs in unnecessary illness, infant mortality, and pre-

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mature adult deaths. These costs are cruel because they are preventable. They are preventable, that is, whenever we finally decide to break the “curse of poverty” and take on the powerful political and economic interests who stand in the way of national health care.

One feature of the “curse” that has long held much of white America in its spell is the stereotype of the Undeserving Poor. The poor deserve their plight, goes this notion, because they are lazy, irresponsible, and immoral. Lately, except in the most right-wing camp of curmudgeons, this caricature has become harder to sustain.

Working people throughout the United States in the 1990s put in more hours on the job than they did 10 years ago but have less real income to show for their labor. Tens of millions of Americans are only one medical crisis away from financial disaster. How many feel they are “undeserving” of health care? Anyone reading these words can no doubt list friends or relatives who have lost jobs in the ongoing economic crisis or who are without health insurance. The nation has seen these true life stories dramatized this television season by the Connor family on Roseanne. Last year’s downwardly mobile household becomes this year’s working poor.

We are left to ask, are the 4 percent of Americans who, thanks to Reagan-Bush economics, now make as much money each year as the bottom 51 percent more deserving?

Economic status is the major determinant of health in America. The South’s high rates of infant mortality, low birth weight, bad nutrition, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, smoking-related cancers, and stroke are all directly related to poverty.

In the 1960s, Dr. King pointed out that more than twice as many whites as blacks were in poverty in America. This remains true today. Yet, Census data and public health studies tell us that for the African-American population as a whole the extent of poverty and poor health, as well as a newborn’s prospects for a long life, are far worse than for whites. Half of all African-American children under age five live in poverty. Life expectancy for whites is about 75 years, for African-Americans it is less than 70. A Black male born today can plan on living about 65 years. For middle-aged African-Americans, a Centers for Disease Control study has shown, the inability to afford medical care accounts for the difference in the black and white death rate.

“We have the best health care system in the world,” say the American Medical Association and the health insurance industry. Their claim recalls a scene from Andy Griffith’s first movie, “No Time for Sergeants.” Will Stockdale, the character Andy plays, is bailing out of the back of an airplane in flames. While the plane flies on

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automatic, the pilot and co-pilot are asleep in the cockpit. “Surely,” Private Stockdale says, looking back from under his parachute, “they’re not so easy going as to not know they’re on fire.”

Those who profit from sickness and death in America have no plans to bail out. They’d much rather go on spending a million dollars a year in Congress blocking any reform proposals, calling them “socialized medicine.” At the same time, insurers practicing capitalist medicine refuse to cover—or they drop from coverage—the poorest, sickest, oldest, and the most high-risk groups, such as AIDS patients. At least 35 million Americans now have no health insurance at all.

Our country has the resources to make comprehensive, high-quality, health care available to all. We also have the resources to put an end to poverty. At present, 35 percent of our national wealth is owned by the top 1 percent of the U.S. population. The huge gap between rich and poor in America indicates how undemocratic our social system has become. As Victor Sidel, past president of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, puts it, “higher taxes on the wealthy and on corporations is the only just response to this maldistribution, and it also happens to be an answer to our need for publically-financed services.” Access to health care starts out as a demand for the redistribution of wealth and resources. It soon becomes a political struggle for social justice.

“National health insurance,” Barbara Ehrenreich observes, “is an idea whose time has come, and gone, and come again.” This time around we should seize the moment as one step toward civilizing ourselves.

Poverty and the South in 1991

		% in Poverty	Rank
	AL	18.8	48
	AR	17.3	44
	FL	15.4	35
	GA	17.2	43
	KY	18.8	48
	LA	19	49
	MS	23.7	51
	NC	14.5	30
	OK	17	42
	SC	16.4	41
	TX	17.5	45
	VA	9.9	9
	WV	17.9	46

Source: US Census. The poverty level in 1991 for one person was $6,932, for a family of four, $13, 924.

Sandinistas and Mountaineers: Cultural Politics in Appalachia and Nicaragua

By David E. Whisnant

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 4-15

The story I begin with will be familiar to you: the government needed both revenue and a way to exert tighter control over a population it considered morally lax and not entirely loyal, so it levied a tax on home-brewed liquor, authorized a few monopolistic entrepreneurs to brew most of it, and hunted down moonshiners and destroyed their small stills. As one historian of the episode notes, such tactics “drove the small dealers … out of business … raised the price of a drink, … [and deprived] many of their incomes. The [small dealers] protested government interference in their business and pleasure. Popular wrath over the … monopoly led to rebellion and the violent deaths of at least two [of the monopolistic entrepreneurs], who were also political figures.”1

This little drama did not happen in Appalachia in the 1790s or 1920s, however, but in Nicaragua in the 1840s, when President Fruto Chamorro imposed the aguardiente laws upon rural people, and a few sugar plantation owners made a killing as a result.

Sometimes when people ask me how I made such an abrupt move from writing about Appalachia to trying to learn about Nicaragua, I tell them it just meant moving from one Third World country to another. Now and then I even amuse myself by playing with parallels between the two. I imagine the rebellious Appalachian coal miners’ encampment at Blair Mountain in the 1920s, for example, as Gen. Sandino’s hideout at El Chipote a half-dozen years later. With no trouble at all coal operators become coffee planters, and the National Guard that served the operators’ interests becomes la Guardia Nacional that served

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those of the Somoza regime. Thomas Wolfe even looks a lot like the Protean, prolific, hard-loving and dipsomaniacal Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío—neither of whom could ever really leave or go home again, and so wandered forever in that ultimate diaspora of the mind. Appalachian studies pioneer Cratis Williams becomes the bearded and puckish Pablo Antonio Cuadra, both of them diminutive, witty and fascinated by what it really means to be a mountaineer or a Nicaraguan. The People’s Appalachian Research Collective of the late 1960s reminds me uncannily of the contemporaneous ventana group of radical students at Nicaragua’s national university. Had courageous Mountain Eagle publisher Tom Gish ever met La Prensa‘s dauntless Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, they would have had a lot to talk about, as would Appalshop film makers with the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers. Highlander Center’s Myles Horton—whom I saw for the last time at the regular Thursday morning protest in front of the U.S. Embassy in Managua—reminds me strongly of the patriarchal and always provocative octogenarian Nicaraguan writer José Coronel Urtecho.2

These fanciful associations are intriguing, but sometimes the actual historical connections between Nicaragua and Appalachia are both startling and sobering. To tell you about just one of them, I will borrow from a piece I wrote two years ago.3

In 1851—when thousands of men were in a hurry to get to the California gold fields—Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt secured a monopoly on the Nicaraguan transit route and made himself a tidy new pile of money. Some of it he used to buy a 270-foot steam-powered yacht. He panelled its salons with satinwood, furnished them with hand-carved and velvet-“American taste and skill.”4

Some of the rest of his money Vanderbilt passed along to his sons and grandsons. Grandson George W. Vanderbilt came to Asheville in the 1890s and in a grand and imperial spirit similar to his grandfather’s built a three hundred-room French chateau which be appointed with the finest European furniture, tapestries, and paintings. His guests approached the estate through a picturesque half-timber and tile English village named “Biltmore” and provided with an Episcopal chapel and loyal curate.

Shortly after the Vanderbilt mansion opened in 1895, my grandfather and his brother left their small farm in the Rutherford County foothills and went up the mountain to Asheville looking for work. They found it driving streetcars, work my grandfather continued to do for the next fifty years. He never returned to the house he had built with his own hands on the farm and always meant to go back to to live in some day. Many mornings when he arrived at the Asheville Street Railroad Company’s “car barn” at 3:30 a.m., he set out to make the Biltmore run.

About the time my grandfather died, my high school classmates and I were taken on a “field trip” to see the cultural wonders of the Biltmore house—to “expose” us to “great art,” of which we in our culturally benighted hillbilly ignorance presumably knew nothing. All I remember is feeling dwarfed by the scale of the place, and ashamed of my clothing and my ignorance. Thus one of my most poignant moments of clarification during my Nicaraguan work occurred when I read that the ship that carried U.S. troops to Nicaragua’s east coast to move against the rebel general Sandino in April 1931 was named the USS Asheville.

So my moving from Appalachia to Nicaragua wasn’t all that difficult, and in some ways it wasn’t much of a move at all, because I was so frequently reminded of connections. In other ways it was difficult, though, and still feels that way: threatening, disquieting, at times bewildering. But also at least predictable, and perhaps even inevitable. In a little piece I wrote a dozen years ago, I said that for me working in and on Appalachia has always made more sense as process than as position or condition.5 So it has remained, and the process eventually carried me to a small, poor, Catholic, Spanish-speaking, wracked and tortured country.

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Although I haven’t written much about Appalachia in nearly ten years, the region has never been off my mind. It has never been absent as a frame of reference, a ground to come back to in my thinking, a critical test-case for any elegant theory I encounter. It was in the mountains, after all, that I first began to learn about corporate capitalism and colonialism; about metropoles and peripheries; about intervention and cultural stereotypes; about the old-time music and rowdy banjo pickers the “good music” people were afraid to like; about the local color stories, dulcimer pluckers, and flaxen-haired ballad singers they did like, and why; about poor people’s movements and why they (too often) fail; about some everyday forms of resistance; and about the political and psychological necessities of revisionism—and a few of its perils as well.

No analogy is perfect, and all analogies are dangerous, but there are certainly worse places to go to Nicaragua from than Appalachia.

At least I went knowing that with a lot of help from my friends I had already managed to teach myself something about one corner of the world, and I figured maybe I could manage the process again. All of that has served me well as I have labored to learn a new language and to understand new things—most of which I had never even heard of that day when at the age of forty-six I registered as an undergraduate student in Spanish, walked into a classroom with a bunch of nineteen year-olds, and said my first hesitant buenos días.

So for the past six years, instead of thinking and reading about Kentucky coal baron John C.C. Mayo and settlement school founder Katherine Pettit, local color stories and Morris dancers, broadform deeds and pneumoconiosis, growth centers and hinterlands, it has been caciques and encomenderos, León Liberals and Granada Conservatives, filibusters and financieros, Carlos Fonseca and Ricardo Morales Avilís, the vanguardistas and the exterioristas, and of course the Somocistas and Sandinistas.6

Both the language and the materials are different, then, but many of the questions are those that have long intrigued me: What is the role of culture in processes of social and political reconstruction? Within such processes, what is the dialectic between elite and vernacular culture? What is the nature of tradition, and what contradictions lurk within it? How has tradition been used for purposes of political legitimation? What are the political functions of cultural institutions, and the cultural functions of political ones? What about the politics of the many ways of representing culture? And most intriguing of all to me these days, what does one do about the most recalcitrant and politically reactionary cultural formations? I will try to outline several of the things I am currently thinking about as I work on some of these questions in another part of the world that with eerie frequency reminds me of home.

Since the 1520s, when the conquering Spaniards first got serious about Nicaragua, culture has never ceased to be an arena of conflict. During the three hundred years between conquest and independence, that conflict took innumerable forms. Within less than a half-century, a genocidal assault reduced maybe a million original inhabitants to around 10,000 or so. Forced Christianization and hispanicization displaced habits and beliefs, foods and clothing, houses and communities, crops and animals, language and lifeways, even the very names of things. Two centuries of forced labor, disease and racial mixing took further heavy tolls. During the mid-nineteenth century, hordes of gold-seekers and adventurers boarded Commodore Vanderbilt’s steamers and poured through the short-cut across Nicaragua on their way to California, leaving ramshackle hotels, inflation, prostitutes, shabby business deals, and empty rum bottles and liniment jars in their wake. Less than a decade later, the demented filibusterer William Walker—the Ollie North of the period—had visions of turning Nicaragua into another Venice by forcing people to speak English, re-establishing slavery and deeding the land to enterprising white folks.

After the Walker war, ambitious coffee planters shoved indigenous people off the land and into the wage-labor market. And “economic development” schemes calculated to Europeanize language, thought, architecture, education and public policy led to sporadic but frequently bloody rebellions by mountain-dwelling Indians who got tired of it all.

In the twentieth century, cultural conflict in Nicaragua has taken more forms than I have time even to name: it came with the US Marines, who virtually ran the country from 1912 to 1933, and it was central to the struggle of Sandino’s “crazy little army” (1927-33) to dislodge them. It was evident in the cultural sycophancy of the three Somozas, and in the post-war rise of Miami as Nicaragua’s cultural metropole. In time, traditional culture became a critical weapon in the FSLN struggle against the Somozas. Following the fall of the last Somoza, the Sandinistas made a serious if flawed effort to integrate cultural programs and policies into the overall reconstruction of the country, and when the Sandinistas themselves lost the election a decade later, the new government—bought and paid for with U.S. dollars—moved swiftly to reverse

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the process.

A couple of specific episodes in this long-running drama put me in mind of the ongoing cultural-political process here in the mountains. The first one has to do with the political uses of what Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital.

The Political Uses of Cultural Capital

From the 1830s onward, foreign entrepreneurs were trying to buy and sell Nicaragua, and the native oligarchy were scheming to convert it into a coffee plantation and use the profits to Europeanize themselves, their cities, and their low-wage workers. At the same time, newly established archaeological and ethnological museums in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Washington, and elsewhere were beginning to scour the whole world for cultural treasures in order to build their collections. Racing each other to wherever such things were to be found—Egypt, Latin America, Asia, the Pacific Northwest—they either dug them up themselves or bought them from whoever had dug them up first.7

Most vulnerable in this process were small, weak, colonial or quasi-colonial states which needed cash and lacked museums of their own. They had few if any laws to prevent the removal of their antiquities, and they were mesmerized by European culture rather than their own anyway. Although Nicaragua had none of the fabulous cultural riches then being discovered in Mexico, Guatemala, or Peru, it had enough to command attention: massive carved stone monoliths, pre-conquest pottery urns and burial jars, and gold and jade ornaments.

And so archaeologists, graverobbers, dealers’ agents, and curiosity seekers plundered Nicaragua for such cultural valuables. To find them, they smooth-talked local leaders in indigenous communities, bribed informers, prevailed upon local priests, lobbied government functionaries, and blundered about on their own, led by hunch, rumor and the published accounts of those who had preceded them. Renting small boats to get to offshore islands, hacking their way through underbrush, paying local men with a few coins and a lot of liquor to do the physical labor, they excavated the mounds, piled what they found in bongos and carts, hauled it to the nearest port and shipped it to dealers and museums.

Such artifacts—or at least the ones that didn’t end up decorating Victorian parlors and drawing rooms—provided data for researchers vying to establish the emerging disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, and ethnology. They helped justify the lucky museums’ claims upon public funds, and enhanced their standing among competitors. In turn, having such museums boosted the cultural legitimacy of the growing nation-states of western Europe and North America. And viewing such collections helped their citizens to rank themselves above the “sav-

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age,” “primitive,” and “barbaric” peoples who inhabited the colonial corners of the world from which the raw materials and surplus labor required for empire-building were being extracted. Taken as a whole, it was a process that—however useful scientifically—expropriated the movable cultural capital of poor and vulnerable countries, transported it to wealthier countries, and used it to rationalize, buttress, legitimize, and extend domination.

As with my little moonshiner anecdote at the beginning, I suspect that much of this process has a familiar ring. Although Appalachia has no pre-conquest statuary or burial mounds laden with gold and jade, much of its marketable cultural capital has been collected and shipped out, nevertheless: ginseng, galax, and ghost stories; ballads, baskets and bawdy lore; jokes and Jack tales; fiddle and banjo tunes, quilts and pots and chairs.

Over the years, as we all know, such cultural capital has been peddled by middle-class magazines, record producers, film makers, and Park Service trinket shops.8 It has boosted the fortunes of political candidates, political parties from the Republicans to the Communists, and Protestant missions all over. It has drawn audiences for radio preachers and television evangelists, and helped to sell Crazy Water Crystals and Peruna, JFG coffee and Martha White flour, baby chicks and insurance, song books and even autographed pictures of Jesus Christ. It has been grist for the mills of serious (if chauvinistic) ballad collectors like Cecil Sharp, Jack Tale-telling or ballad warbling charlatans like Richard Chase and John Jacob Niles, New York concert singers like Josephine McGill, racist ideologues like the White Top Folk Festival’s John Powell, and elite composers like Aaron Copeland. And of course it has swelled the catalog of many a museum and archive.

Fortunately, unlike Nicaraguan stone monuments or burial urns, at least some of our cultural capital—songs and stories, jokes and language—perennially renews itself. We have also created some of our own museums and archives for local people to study and learn from, and some film and recording companies are representing Appalachian culture in thoughtful and honest ways.

These developments are encouraging, but some of the complexities of using cultural capital for political purposes nevertheless continue to perplex us. When we are analyzing how others use it for reactionary political purposes, we do pretty well; stereotypes we understand. But when we try to marshall our cultural capital for progressive purposes, we do less well. Too often we find ourselves making rather palpably romantic arguments, generalizing somewhat recklessly, and excusing things not easily excusable.

Why is this the case? I think the difference has to do with some of the intractable structural perils of historical and cultural revisionism. In this regard, some aspects of the recently deposed Sandinista government’s cultural policies are as suggestive as the aggressive digging and hauling of cultural artifacts in the nineteenth century.

The Perils of Cultural Revisionism

During their turbulent decade in power, the Sandinistas labored to comprehend Nicaragua’s cultural history, assess the cultural impact of a century of North American cultural intervention, design a new cultural strategy, build new cultural institutions, and integrate the whole project with the larger process of national reconstruction.9

I lack the space here to even sketch the barest outline of the process, but were I to do so, a lot of it would seem very familiar to you. I would talk about the role of mainstream culture in maintaining quiescence and domination; the criticism of cultural stereotypes; the revitalization of local cultural resources; the documentation of oral traditions; the creation of new museums and archives; the publication of new magazines, newspapers and journals; the staging of cultural competitions and festivals; the production of films, phonograph records, and radio and television programs; and new modes of expression in

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poetry, fiction, dance and drama.

Not everything the Sandinistas did was as historically and culturally grounded as it should have been; not everyone who was involved performed as well as they should have performed. There were losses and obfuscations as well as gains and clarifications. Some of it worked and some of it didn’t; some of it was brilliant and some of it was ill-considered. Some of it was politically clear and honest, and some of it was confused and dishonest. But when all was said and done, the country was at least slightly more culturally self-conscious, self-confident, and self-directing than it had been before. Although impeded early in its course by the budgetary pressures and social chaos of the contra war, and finally terminated by the US-financed installation of the current reactionary government, that decade-long process stimulated much positive ferment in Nicaraguan cultural and political life.10

For the moment, however, I want to think about a few of the structural problems of this enterprise, rather than any of its specific gains or losses. To those of us who worry ourselves over the Appalachian region, those problems are suggestive. I will call them (hang in, and I will eventually explain these admittedly somewhat cumbersome terms) the limits of counterpositions, the instrumentalization of the cultural past, and the recalcitrance of deep cultural structures.11 One at a time, now.

The limits of counterpositions: If the values one espouses are humane, there is something inherently clarifying, energizing, and empowering about taking a counterposition—about saying , it was not that way, but this way, and it is going to be another way in the future. Eastern Kentucky widow Ollie Combs didn’t speak Spanish, but she knew as well how to say ¡no pasarán! (They shall not pass) with her body in front of coal company bulldozers as Nicaraguan men and women did with their homemade weapons in front of Somoza’s tanks, and as they did later against Reagan’s contras.12 Such counterpositions are both noble and ennobling, wherever they are taken.

And yet as I watched and listened in Nicaragua, I kept being reminded of old arguments I used to make at meetings in the mountains. More than once I had made myself unpopular by arguing that explanations of oppression which locate causes solely outside are more seductively attractive than those which locate at least some of them inside. For all the very real pain of being a victim, there is something subliminally delicious and self-justifying about feeling oneself to be one, and the bonding among sufferers that arises out of such feelings has its costs as well as its benefits. If victimizing and blaming the victim are perennial dangers, so are collaboration and self-victimization. Such are the dangers of counterpositions. “Nosotros nicaragüenses,” my Managua taxi driver cautioned me over and over, “somos mentirosos” (We Nicaraguans are liars). He was, I slowly discovered, neither wholly correct nor (alas) wholly incorrect

Instrumentalizing the cultural past: Whatever the risks of counterpositions, the Sandinistas faced not only a Herculean task of physical and economic reconstruction, but also a psychological and cultural one. For that, history had to be recovered, reinterpreted, and mobilized. After more than a hundred years of systematic cultural intervention from North America and Europe, and nearly a half-century of the supine cultural sycophancy of the Somoza regime, it was imperative to recover the best of Nicaragua’s own cultural past and to marshall it in the larger process of reconstruction. That is, to instrumentalize it. And therein lay both the central challenge and the greatest danger.

There is nothing inherently wrong with instrumentalizing the past; ethical and political issues arise only with respect to the ends for which the instrumentalizing is being done. In any case, it is almost inevitable that a past recovered will be a past instrumentalized, and one might even argue that there is no other equally compelling reason to recover it. In the worst cases, the past is recovered (hence instrumentalized) to fabricate, erase, mislead, confuse, and dominate. In the best cases, we recover it to delight, to admonish, to

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remind, to instruct, to guide. But even then there are costs and dangers of doing so, and they arise because it is so much easier—at least in the short run—to instrumentalize a neat, essentialized and romanticized past than to instrumentalize a messy and contradictory one. And to the extent that we allow ourselves to be guided by a romanticized past we will find ourselves misguided.

Thus, to take a single example, the moment of the cultural-political past which most fascinated the Sandinistas was the late 1920s. At that moment, they argued, a unitedly anti-imperialistic Nicaragua, galvanized by General Sandino and relying upon moral superiority, native cunning and homemade weapons, defeated the technologically superior, air-borne, blue-eyed Marine Corps devils from the North.

Much of this counter-narrative was true: Sandino and his “crazy little army” lived and fought valiantly, and evidence of yankee devilment was easy enough to come by. But it was also pretty clearly not true that Sandino was either the Marxist revolutionary or the complete moral paragon the Sandinistas held him up to be.13

Nor was he the hero of all the downtrodden of Nicaragua. Indeed on the Atlantic Coast—a part of their country about which most of the latter-day Sandinistas knew next to nothing—Sandino was more likely to be either unknown or blamed for the economic collapse of the early 1930s.

For this reason and others, the latter-day Sandinistas—at least early in the post-Somoza era—experienced endless culturally-based political difficulty with the Miskito coast. Worse yet, some aspects of their political-cultural-historical paradigm frustrated and delayed their understanding of what the problem was. Meanwhile, the limitlessly cynical Reaganistas—as ideological heirs of the reactionary U.S. officials who had dismissed Sandino as a mere “bandit” in the 1920s—mercilessly manipulated the Sandinistas’ befuddlement as the contra war escalated.14

Like the Sandinistas, we in Appalachia have spent a number of years now recovering and re-instrumentalizing a cultural past that had been used so many times before, by so many, for so many purposes. So far, so good. But like the Sandinistas, we have romanticized as well. And to the extent that that is true, we complicate the work that still lies ahead.

Why? Perhaps most of all because it dulls our awareness of what I’ll call the recalcitrance of deep cultural structures. Maybe another little Sandinista analogy will help explain what I mean.

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Cultural recalcitrance: The Sandinista revolution was the darling of the global left—not without reason—and its revitalized culture was certainly one of the most marketable things it had going for it. Clad in white cotona and black beret, Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal jetted over the world talking of a new culture that would be revolutionary, national, anti-imperialistic, and popular. He enchanted people with the primitive paintings of Solentiname and the poetry of the poetry workshops.15 The brothers Mejía-Godoy took their dynamic musical groups everywhere, and their rendition of the hauntingly simple melody “Nicaragua, Nicaragüita” became the unofficial national anthem. In post-Somoza Nicaragua, cultural energy literally poured out in song, in dance, in film, in museums, and in lucid, powerful, and passionate poetry. For a while it looked as if the wave of political-cultural transformation and renewal would make anything possible.

As they say in Spanish, hubiera sido tan agradable (it would have been so nice). But policy has its limits, and sometimes those limits are severe. However hidden by the majestically breaking waves of change, those limits—like long-wave undercurrents—were thrust to the surface by some treacherous reefs and shoals of cultural history and structure. Some of them, surviving from the particularities of the Spanish colonial period, have no counterparts in the southern mountains. But others are worth looking out for. I will chart but one of several that come easily to mind. It is the problem of gender.

However much men stood to gain by a real revolution in Nicaragua, women stood to gain more because their oppression was more severe. And so women threw themselves into the revolutionary process with astounding dedication, courage, and effect.

Some stayed behind and kept the kids clean and fed, as women customarily had done. Some capitalized on traditional stereotypes to work underground as runners of supplies, messages, and arms. But vast numbers took up arms themselves, fighting valiantly beside the men. Eventually women constituted about a third of the entire fighting force, and some rose to command units before their twentieth birthdays.16

All along, urged forward by emerging women’s organizations, the Sandinistas proclaimed total gender equality as official policy. The new post-macho man was to be a key to the new society.

A whole string of laws were passed to implement the new policy on women.17 Gender issues became a focus of special attention in the writing of the new constitution.18 A few things actually changed, but much did not. And some of it, the women said, got worse—such as physical violence and the sexual double standard.

What was happening was that revolutionary resolve and official policy were colliding with centuries-deep layers of stubbornly recalcitrant machismo which post-revolutionary narratives of the past could not admit. That recalcitrance was easily traceable all the way back to before the conquest, and it had been repeatedly transformed and newly reinforced in every decade since. It was central to the elite patriarchy in nineteenth-century Nicaragua. It is ubiquitous in the twentieth, and remained embarrassingly evident even in Daniel Ortega’s final election campaign against Violeta Chamorro, when some Sandinista women wore “Daniel is my gamecock” T-shirts, and women who supported Chamorro but also unexpectedly favored abortion rights clashed from time to time with Sandinista women who opposed them.19

What does this have to do with Appalachia? It suggests to me, at least that we need to be very cautious in our expectations about cultural change, no matter how auspicious the policy context. It also implies that deep internal cultural contradictions deserve at least as much attention as do structures of external exploitation and domination, real and onerous as they are. For unless those internal structural contradictions are identified, addressed, and dealt with, whatever else we do is likely to have far less impact than it needs to. And there are a God’s plenty of contradictions in Appalachia and throughout our beloved southland.

Despite every political preference I have, every mountain-born-and-bred loyalty in my heart and body, I have

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been driven by all I have seen and read and learned these twenty-odd years to consider the terrifying possibility that some of the bedrock features of culture in the mountains are also its most recalcitrantly problematic substructures. My list of such features is short, and shares nothing, I hope, with those justly reviled ones of the local colorists and feud-fascinated journalists, or with those of Jack Weller.20 I beg you to consider it: a profoundly sexist gender system, religious and political fundamentalism, distrust of a broad social contract, and an embarrassingly mainstream entrapment in a free enterprise paradigm.

In sum, then, my argument is that cultural capital is a much-coveted political resource; that counterpositions, while useful and exciting, have their limits; that instrumentalizing the past is necessary but problematic; and that some self-critical introspection about those features of the culture that most stubbornly resist change is long overdue. These facts—if such they are—are critically important because from here on things are going to get much rougher.

And where is it we have yet to go? We each have our own priorities. In closing I will mention a couple of my own.

Beyond Coterie Politics

So much lately has conspired to make me think about how to make what we have learned these last years available and meaningful to ordinary people—to those whose votes were and are so avidly sought not only by the George Bushes and their ilk, but increasingly by the truly psychopathic Helmses, Buchanans and Dukes. We have learned how to talk to each other; the urgent need now is to synthesize a politics that will make sense—for good reasons—to your average insurance salesman, golfer, or computer programmer, and also to my Managua taxi driver who (besides telling me Nicaraguans were liars) kept assuring me that the country had no problems another invasion of the U.S. Marines couldn’t cure.

Whatever else is not clear these days, it seems to me, it is clear that both public political discourse and popular political conthat my politics were about as correct as it was possible for them to get. Shortly after I arrived, I was standing on a Managua street photographing a revolutionary mural someone had painted on a long fence around some ruins from the earthquake. Suddenly I realized that a group of women were shouting at me from across the street that that art was not their art, that it most emphatically did not represent their views, and that above all I should not use the photograph later to show folks at home that all Nicaraguans were united in Sandinista solidarity. Sometimes I think that a lot of our work is like that mural: colorful, dramatic and politically correct, but not persuasive to most people.

Which leads me to my second little incident. On a bitter-cold night this past winter I joined hundreds of students and townspeople jammed into the biggest auditorium on the UNC campus to hear Noam Chomsky say

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the New World Order is just the Old World Order only worse. At one level the scene was inspiriting and reassuring; somebody was finally talking sense, calling a spade a spade, tracing critical relationships and sequences, blowing covers that were begging to be blown. The longer I sat there, though, the more I felt that it was too easy. There probably weren’t three dozen people in that audience who hadn’t arrived already sure that Chomsky was right, and there weren’t enough votes there even to carry northern Orange County for decent, black, and by no means radical Harvey Gantt against arch-cretin Jesse Helms.

What I think this means is that the most urgent political necessity that faces us is to transform some of our most cherished political rhetorics and paradigms of political action—to break out from the already committed coteries to form some progressive new majority.

Far better than the left, it seems to me, the Reagans, Bushes, Dukes and Buchanans have assessed where masses of people are in their heads, and have opened political and semantic paths leading there. Having done so, they have effectively captured the political discourse, and are speaking to people’s worst fears and most virulent prejudices. They have, in a word, tapped into the most troublesome of the deep structures I have been talking about—fear, anger, suspicion, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia—and have mobilized them in the service of right-wing cynicism, greed, hostility, arrogance and all the rest.

As surely as machismo stalked the Sandinista revolution, the problematic deep structures of culture in Appalachia, in the Piedmont, in the Delta, and across our land will continue to impel our slide into fascist politics if they are not addressed far more effectively than they have been or have been recently.

We simply must address them; we are doing neither ourselves nor anyone a service by pretending they are not there. For far too long, the Democrats tried desperately to use the discourse of the right to convey a message of the (barely) center-left.

It was very late in the most recent electoral game before it dawned on at least a few of them (such as Wofford in Pennsylvania) that that was a hopelessly doomed strategy. And even at their best, Clinton and Gore still insisted upon trying to maneuver their buses along the rotten and creaky one-lane bridge of free enterprise, victim-blaming workfare, “strong defense,” and Norman Rockwell family values.

So how might we address them in the mountains (and elsewhere in the south)? First by shifting some of our analysis away from the incontrovertible historical and present realities of exploitation from outside, and toward the contradictory dialectics of life inside. For instrumental purposes, much of our history is useful and inspiriting, but much of it is not and the sooner we face that, the better.21

If we can negotiate such a shift, we must then make what we perceive and choose to say accessible and persuasive to somebody besides readers of Ms. magazine, The Nation, Radical History Review, the trendiest postmodernist journal, or, for that matter, Southern Changes. The troublesome truth is that there is a vast Miskito coast full of folks out there to whom our political heroes are either unknown or are not heroes at all, to whom the most transparent right-wing lie really does seem like an adequate explanation of the way things are and ought to be, and to whom our accustomed rhetoric therefore neither appeals nor is accessible.

And finally, partly to buttress ourselves against terminal depression in the midst of such psychic and political trials, we must find a language and a political strategy that will locate, excavate and mobilize countervailing resources of decency, integrity, generosity, and a larger sense of the common good.

While we restrategize and steel ourselves for facing some things we’d rather not face, we must figure out how to tap the veins of cultural energy still buried and waiting in people’s heads, how to mobilize the humane cultural stuff still scattered across the landscape, how to marshall the bits of serviceable cultural capital still credited to our account, and even that which has been carried off some where else and posted to somebody else’s account-like so many Jack Tales, fiddle tunes, butter churns or Tom Dooleys.

David Whisnant teaches Latin American and Cultural StudiesStudeis [sic] at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book, Beautiful and Pleasant Land: Perspectives on the Politics of Culture in NicaraguaNicaraqua [sic] , is forthcoming from UNC Press.

Life in the Fortress: An Interview with Mary Edwards Wertsch

By Ellen Spears

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 16-20

Ellen Spears: What makes Military Brats so powerful at its core is your own experience as a military daughter. Speaking from that voice gives you a special authority and a special strength.

Mary Edwards Wertsch: It was a struggle for me because I did not originally plan to include my own story. I am a journalist, a newspaper reporter. I did not know Pat Conroy, but I wanted to tell him that it was because of The Great Santini that I was embarking on this book. I just wanted to thank him for opening my eyes. I didn’t know … if he would even be receptive. He, of course, turned up as this wonderful, warm, gregarious, supportive person. And then we started swapping stories.

In the course of that conversation he said, “Mary, you have got to put your own story in the book.” I said, “No, I’m not. I am a reporter, and I am doing this like everything else I have done.”

…. So I sat down to write the first chapter I wrote, the Daughters of Warriors chapter, and realized immediately that I would have to put my story in it. If I did not it was going to lack authenticity and passion and probably credibility.

It was cathartic. It had to be done, but I shrieked, I screamed as I wrote my brother’s story. My brother was 11 years older, and I was just a little girl watching him get beaten every night. The helplessness. The anger. So even though I was working through a lot of feelings about my father and affirming my love—you can have these feelings side by side—I was shrieking out at this bastard who did

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these things. I got my brother’s permission to use it in the book. People have a hard time reading those middle chapters of the book. But I say to people, please read to the end because the book is about healing. I was at Fort Bragg [N.C.] and did a signing at the PX. There was a woman who was waiting for me when I arrived, a silver-haired woman, a colonel’s wife, I believe. She told me, “I have to tell you when I read your hardback last year, I started it and I was thinking why are you torturing us like this? The more I read the more I found myself thinking this is really true, this is really true.” She bought four paperbacks for her four grown kids. She had me inscribe each one. She is giving them to her kids on the Fourth of July, saying, “Read the last chapter first”

E: A lot of military families come through the South at one point or another. Did you feel any particular things about this region in the interviews or in your own experience?

M: The Southern connection for me? Well, my mother is from Athens, Georgia. When I was growing up, it was the only geographical place I felt tied to in any way. I had only visited there a few times. But I yearned for it.

I wanted to be like my cousins who were rooted and had such a supportive network of people. I keep trying to find out what rootedness is in various ways.

I think Pat Conroy is a strong example that people can relate to. He was born in Atlanta but like most military brats that is coincidental. He was Marine Corps, and they stayed mainly in bases in the South. Because his mother was also Southern, from Alabama, be felt a connection here, too.

Military brats have to find some place to roost when they are adults. Pat wanted roots. He decided he was going to be a Southerner.

The South has a tremendous appeal for military brats because in accent, lifestyle, and culture it is something. We want to be somebody from somewhere, to have a sense of belonging. Of course for me, writing this book was an exercise in finding out who I really am as a military brat. I found out that I do have roots. Very intense ones.

I just visited Fort Bragg, near Fayetteville. My father was stationed at there for a year and a half. I went to half of third grade and all of fourth there. It was a wonderful post to live on at that time. It had great trees to climb and bushes to hide in. To return there was a little nostalgic to me. Every military base feels like home to a military brat because it is so familiar no matter whether you want to be in the military or would never do it, it feels like home. But you cannot find my name or my family’s name anywhere on that base or anyone who knew us. There is a total changeover in people all the time.

E: In The Great Santini, the family must move out of the house when the father dies; it is almost seamless with the funeral. They empty out of the house and are on their way.

M: Right. That is one of the really terrible tragedies of military life. Right when you lose, for example, the father (in that case in an accident), it can happen at any time, or war, you have to lose all the support of the community, too. You are banished from the community. Kicked out.

E: What are you saying about the culture and feeling more at home here, is it more hospitable to military culture in the South?

M: Do you mean there seems to almost be a Southern tradition to serve in the military? A lot of people have Southern connections to it to their relatives. The South is loaded with bases. It is probably cheaper for DOD to have them in the South because you do not have to shovel snow and you do not have to have problems flying in and out. It is a good place for air bases.

E: During my three years with SANE/FREEZE, one of the things that we noted was that the Southern political climate has been much more hospitable to military interests, with Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn and Richard Russell before him in the Armed Services Committee, there’s a heavy concentration of bases here.

M: They all like defense contracts because ostensibly that brings jobs. Of course it does, but the military is certainly not the best investment of money to produce jobs. It is not labor intensive. It is a lot of hardware.

E: What is happening to people now that there are cutbacks in military spending?

M: There is a tremendously high stress level in the military now because of this RIF, Reduction in Force…. Plus this is coming on the heels of a war, the Gulf War, when the divorces among active duty personnel skyrocket …. What does the Department of Defense do at this time in the wake of the war, they know that divorces are skyrocketing, there are all kinds of family problems

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happening. They cut the medical benefits, the CHAMPUS benefits. They raised the deductible which made it unaffordable for many military families to go get counseling or psychiatric help.

It is tremendously stressful. If you are in some line of work within the military that translates well into civilian life, it might be some financial thing, it might be computers, the stress is still there but not quite as threatening. But let us say you are an infantryman. You are a trained killer. What are you going to do? Or you are a tank driver. What do you do? That means you are not only talking about that individual but the wife and the children. And most people in the military are married. Most of those families do have children.

E: There was this image in the Gulf War of both parents going or the mom going. How has that affected military families?

M: I was outraged at that. I find it unconscionable that both parents would be sent to a combat zone. What can they be thinking of to do that? It is bad enough when one parent is sent, but when both parents are sent to a combat zone, that is a trauma those children will have to deal with the rest of their lives. It is inexcusable. You had a Secretary of Defense, Cheney, who had an exemption from combat duty in Vietnam because he had a wife who was pregnant and a child at home.

There was talk of chemical bombing, biological warfare. Some mothers obviously were in combat zones. For the most part women are in a support capacity. That means they are targeted because the enemy frequently in warfare will try to cut off the supply fines first. That means they are sitting ducks for chemical, biological weaponry.

This was reported on the news …. Military brats watch the news. I can tell you from Vietnam days and before and from people I interviewed, civilian kids might not have even known there was a war going on. Military kids knew about the Tet offensive. They were looking for their fathers. They were looking for their father’s friends on the news.

E: You talk in the book about the mother’s role as the revisionist family historian.

M: I talk some about the importance of myth in military families and the military in general. The military is like a Greek drama. You have archetypes walking around all over the place. As Pat Conroy once told me, it is not easy being the child of an archetype.

Military parents have a very tough challenge. I am deeply sympathetic to them. I think this is part of healing for those of us from dysfunctional families is to find empathy truly for our parents because they often did the best they could. I do not believe in obscuring accountability for really terrible acts at all, but I do think it is possible to get past that, and part of that is to put ourselves in our parents shoes.

Mothers in the military see themselves as responsible for keeping the family together through endless uprootings and the threat of war, real war sometimes, all sorts of coping situations. Part of the way they do this is to spin myths. It is a very important thing to give to them as they see it to give children a version that will help them, a helpful version. It may not be true at all. Your father loves you. Your father wants to be with you. Your father wants to spend more time with you. That may not be true at all. But how can I say that was not a useful thing to be told at the time?

The thing is that the child grows up and begins to see the holes in the story and then you sense the hurt and the outrage at the lies. There is a tendency to blame the mother who has spun this lie, this myth.

There are other myths. Of course there is always the myth that, and here I am treading on dangerous territory from the military point of view, there is always a myth in the military that every action in which they engage is for the freedom of the United States. That is a cardinal belief.

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In fact I think it was yesterday in North Carolina I passed by in the car this enormous old Veteran’s Administration hospital. Neatly manicured lawn in front. A large brick place with white columns and a big sign out front that said “Veteran’s Administration Hospital.” Let us see if I can get the name right that they had on the front: “Here is where the price that we pay for freedom is visible.” That is a myth right there: for freedom.

Military families, in view of the tremendous sacrifice they are making day in and day out need to lean on myths like that. I do not begrudge them that. They need it to survive. It is important for those on the outside of the military to see that a bit more clearly and try to affect public policy.

I have belonged to many anti-war groups and one during the Gulf War, too …. Whenever I spoke I made that point that I was not condemning the military people but the policy that was directed by the civilian government

…. I had the strong sense during the Gulf War that the entire thing, the Gulf War itself, the patriotic fervor, everything, had nothing to do with the situation in the Middle East. It had everything to do with Vietnam. It was trying to cleanse that, to purge that out of the national soul. You cannot purge things out of the national soul. Certainly not by papering it over with more lies.

E: What about the sons and the daughters?

M: I have gotten letters a couple of hundred letters from military brats who have identified strongly …. There was one son who called me. He was really affected by the book. He really likes the book, but he said it was very hard for him because it burst his own particular myth. To find that he is a classic military son right down the checklist was disturbing to him. The sons do not feel as much in control of their lives as they thought they were.

Military daughters respond, find themselves the classical military brat daughters, and for them it comes as a huge relief. A daughter gets the same information and feels very comforted. Maybe what men have done is to develop a kind of myth that their isolation is their strength. To find a book that completely contradicts that is disturbing. I may suggest that maybe a son would never have written this book.

E: You have written about feeling as fact in away that I think is unique to a woman’s point of view.

M: I have just started work on another book that is a natural extension,…. the military is not out of my system.

Various people have told me since this book came out, “Oh, the next one you have to do about the wives.”

There has been one book on that, but there needs to be another more profound, slightly different book. I always say a wife should write that book, not me. And black military brats need to write their own story and gays and lesbians need to write theirs. People need to raise their voices and contribute to the literature on our culture.

What I decided is do one on the men. The kind of book I have in mind will never be written by any of them. It is about the emotional realities of serving in the military, all the question marks that are superimposed over my entire experience inside the fortress. All the things I wanted to know about as a child but could not even articulate my questions much less be allowed to ask. I would like to know about their glorious feeling of the joining with this warrior persona that fuels them, that fires them and once a Marine always a Marine. Why? About the glory they can feel in battle. The fear and the terrible loss and the bonding with buddies in war that is unlike anything else and is far more powerful than their ties to their own families. People say it cannot be duplicated in anything in civilian life. ….I want to know about the broken hearts and souls of vets. And, of course, family issues. All these are the emotional realities. These are the very things that the military tries to train its men to distance themselves from. Authoritarians do not key in to the inner voice or anything they feel.

E: I think you may have unlocked something very revealing about our entire culture, with “rise and shine” and “gung ho” and all the language. That was a part of my family. I am not a military brat. My father spent two, maybe four, years in the merchant marine in World War II, but that was part of our life, making the bed with military comers. It has a tremendous influence in civilian life.

M: One of the scariest things going on is that our country seems to be styling itself as the warrior country of the world. There is even a paper that came out of the Pentagon as they try to find a new role for themselves in the wake of the Cold War. This Pentagon paper said there is no need for more than one superpower in the world. Guess who that is going to be? There are tremendous dangers in this and one of the things among others is a masculine/feminine split in society. What is this going to mean emotionally to our country if we adopt this stance in the world? We already see what happens, women and children get short shrift. Infant mortality goes up and the shelters for battered women get closed down. Men as well as women need to raise their voices. We cannot let this

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happen.

E: What impressed me the most was your reconciliation, your ability through clear and careful ground rules, to find love for your father.

M: It is not always possible. I think it important to see that too because I think that wounded adults from dysfunctional families do not need the additional burden of guilt when reconciliation really is not possible. It takes two to reconcile. Sometimes the parent for some reason is not willing or is too sick or whatever. It is not always possible but in that case I really do believe. I could not actually conceive of writing the book if he were still living because I valued our reconciliation…. He would not have been able to stand the revelations of this book.

So where reconciliation is not possible with a living parent it is still possible to continue the dialogue with the inner parent because they are within us; they are part of us.

E: Is there a connection between what you have written and the Tailhook scandal?

M: Even the military realizes that what happened there is unconscionable yet that it was typical. Tailhook was not a unique occurrence. There was a de facto license to conduct themselves in this way and not just in Tailhook but in other aspects of military life. The military has been willing to overlook egregious behavior if it suited the military’s purpose in some way. For example, alcohol.

Why has the military tolerated it when it caused so much damage? Damage to the mission, to the relationships with the civilian community to the warriors themselves, to their families. Why has it been tolerated? Actually encouraged.

The answer is that it suited the military’s purposes and what they believed contributed to bonding. They believe men needed an outlet. And perhaps they felt that it also anesthetized those dangerous emotions. Maybe stilled the questions that men ask themselves about what they are going to be ordered to do and why. I think it has suited to the military’s purpose to have alcohol abused. That’s the ugly truth.

The Gulf War, however, was a totally dry war. They seemed to have done what they chose to do to their own satisfaction without the help of alcohol.

I think the same goes with behavior toward women. Obviously the military does not say that it is alright to go and harass and rape women. But all armies have done this through time. Their commanders, I believe, looked the other way when this happened. This is a more modern version of that behavior. They must feel that it is a kind of outlet that warriors require. Again it is where the feminine voice has to be raised. And there are plenty of men who just despise that kind of behavior. Military men.

E: Tell me more about the organization, Military Brats, Inc.

M: It is just beginning now. It was founded by an Air Force brat named Pamela James. The name was changed. It was first Adult Children of Military Personnel. I assented to that…. [but] later I really changed my mind on that and I asked for it to be discussed among the board and other people felt the same way. There are several things wrong with that name. I do not like the term “adult child” in the first place. It infantalizes grownups who ought to be recognizing their pain but coping with it in a mature responsible way instead of whining. The other thing is that it suggests that this organization is only for military brats only from dysfunctional families and maybe only those who are dysfunctional themselves now. That is a narrowing; we wanted a much broader scope to this. It is an organization for all military brats including those from healthy loving families.

But all military brats regardless of the health of their families have a problem with issues of loss stemming from the extreme mobility of that life. This is the kind of thing that really needs to be talked about because there are such strong repercussions in adulthood, really solid patterns that we have to recognize and break.

It is Military Brats, Inc. It is not named after my book. It is named for the same reason as my book: to identify the group that we are trying to reach. There is a network of support groups.

Soon there will be a newsletter. There is also a computer registry described in the brochure so that we can voluntarily register our information and eventually we hope do computer searches to track down long lost childhood friends. It is very important to us because we lost literally everyone through our childhoods apart from our nuclear families.

We are looking for people who are interested in starting up local chapters.

Military Brats Inc. can be contacted at
P.O. Box 82262
Lincoln, Nebraska 68501-2262
1-800-767-7709

Mary Edwards Wertsch, author of Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress, chronicles the stories of those who served in the military without ever enlisting, the children of military families. Southern Changes managing editor Ellen Spears interviewed Wertsch in June, 1992.

Pax Coca-Cola

By Rodger Brown

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 21-26

I grew up on Coke, so when they built the World of Coca-Cola in 1990, I knew that sooner or later I had to pay a visit. It was not something I wanted to do, but I felt compelled. The gallons of Coke I had drunk during my life at the movies, at McDonald’s, and during Thanksgiving dinners, had somehow magnetized me. I was drawn to the place. At the same time that I felt attracted to the World of Coca-Cola, I was also repulsed. Through the 1980s I had associated Coke with apartheid in South Africa, thanks to a very visible boycott campaign. And Coke’s global ubiquity represented, to me, a kind of cultural denaturing, where the once-profound concepts of life, refreshment, joy and reality were rendered into a carbonated solution and sold by the bottle. Recently, with a notebook in one hand and my ambivalence in the other, I made my pilgrimage.

The World of Coca-Cola is located in a $15 million Lego-postmodern funhouse on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. near Underground in downtown Atlanta. It is described in a brochure as a “tribute” to a “unique product and the consumers who have made it the world’s favorite soft drink.” But there are more facets to Cokeworld than its function as a shrine. It is part company museum, corporate theme park, and Willy Wonka dream factory: where Wonka’s place has rivers that run chocolate and gum that tastes like a whole meal, Cokeworld has geysers that flow with free soda and a version of history that equates the success of Coke with the triumph of democracy.

Also like Willy Wonka’s fantastic chocolate factory, Cokeworld is full of hi-tech rube goldbergs.The first one is the Lasergate, the turnstile on the ground floor. When I went to Cokeworld, I bought a ticket for $2.50 at the front desk. I was directed to the elevator, but first had to pass through the Lasergate. A blinking red message on the Lasergate instructed me to lay my ticket under the laser scanner. I heard a click and went on through the turnstile.

But it was an illusion. I was waiting for the elevator to take me to the third floor, where my adventure was to

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begin, when three older women approached the Lasergate and stood puzzled, trying to read the fast-blinking message. When it looked as though they couldn’t decipher it, a red-sweatered monitor told them to just go on through. The Lasergate was not locked. The whole procedure was unneccessary. The ticket, the laser scanner, and the turnstile are all parts of a ritual of privileged entry, a gesture that we have crossed the threshold from the everyday world to a sacred one.

The sacred nature of Cokeworld is declared by a gargantuan Coke bottle cut-out painted by Georgia folk artist the Rev. Howard Finster, Man of Visions, which hangs by the Lasergate. Rev. Finster instructs us in his scrawled message across the bottom, speaking of salvation but implying the World of Coca-Cola: “….Wake up your soul and be made whole. Go right in Gods great fold. Everything Free, not bought or sold. You need no money the streets are gold, as I get told.”

In his work, Finster often links cold Coca-Cola with Heaven and defines Hell as a place where there “ain’t no cold Coke.” But in his last phrase “as I get told” he reveals that our belief in the perfect Cokeworld is based on faith and the syrupy rhetorical magic of advertising; and as we pass the Lasergate and ride the elevator to the top, we are encouraged to set aside skepticism and for an hour accept Cokeworld’s bogus abolition of private property (“Everything Free, not bought or sold.”

In the 1950s, Robert Woodruff, the late philanthropist and head of the Coca-Cola Company, called Coke the “essence” of capitalism. He was referring to the fact that everyone involved with the product, from the bottlers to the vendors, made easy profits. But there is another sense in which Coke is the essence, or the syrup concentrate, of capitalism, and that is in its advertising. Throughout its corporate history, Coke advertising has been in the avant-garde of advertising strategies in order to stimulate greater levels of consumption. This history of spiritual and alchemical conjuration is on display at The World of Coca-Cola.

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The first encounter at the top of the World of Coca-Cola is with The Bottling Fantasy, a clanking, hissing, idealized bottling machine. On the Bottling Fantasy, bottles with labels from around the world travel in an unstoppable loop, endlessly being filled and emptied and filled again. The effect intended is mythical. Here the production of the elixir is continuous, unstoppable, eternal and global. The Bottling Fantasy is also a defining statement, a metaphor, revealing that Cokeworld is itself actually a gigantic simulated bottling plant: the lore and legend of Coca-Cola equals the syrup and soda water—and we, the visitors, are the bottles.

Once past the Bottling Fantasy, I begin to play my role as bottle. I am filled with Cokeworld’s brew of nostalgic advertising and sanitized, selective corporate history. While I am being glutted with the overwhelming load of familiar Coke images, I realize a curious shift has taken place. All this stuff, this detritus from ad campaigns of the past, was once presented free of charge to entice me, us, others, to drink Coke. But now I pay money to see it. The ads and promotional items have become magical entertainment, and for the admission price I can experience a comfortable feeling of nostalgic displacement; I can enter into the untroubled, idyllic dreamscape of Cokeworld, where all the cheeks are ruddy, every day is a day off, and every Coke a mini-vacation.

Even in the carefully stitched fabric of Coke’s selective history, if I look closely, I can spot the seams, the patched-over stains. I can’t blame the conjurers of Cokeworld for presenting a selective version of the origin and evolution of Coke through these past 100-plus years since that first 1886 batch was brewed there in Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta. After all, you can’t expect to parade thousands of school children past displays of boiling coca leaves. While the one-time cocaine content of Coca-Cola is the company’s most notorious non-secret, there is no display in Cokeworld about it. But you can’t miss the references to the invigorating effects of “coke” when looking at the early promotional materials. Tucked in the middle of one display case is the very first ad for Coca-Cola which appeared in the Atlanta Journal in May 1886. It reads “The New and Popular Soda Fountain Drink, containing the properties of the wonderful Coca plant and the famous Cola nuts.”

I also see an 1898 copy of the promotional Coca-Cola News which featured a Poet Laureate’s Corner, where bottlers penned paeans to Coke syrup. One submission, “Specially written from the heart—by one who KNOWS that Coca-Cola is all, and MORE than is claimed for it,” is rife with the language of dope and addiction:

Happy Happy those who find
One that body tones and mind.
Stronger! stronger! grow they all
Who for Coca-Cola call.
Brighter! brighter! thinkers think
When they Coca-Cola drink.

Even with the coca derivative long-since replaced by increased caffeine content, I can’t help but think of Coca-Cola as a gigantic drug cartel.

By the time the coca derivatives were removed around the turn of the century, the Coca-Cola logo decorated 2.5 million square feet of American building facades, and 10,000 in Cuba and Canada, according to the Coca-Cola company. They were spending half a million dollars on advertising. Those sums quickly increased, and it was up to caffeine and such chubby, cherubic sex symbols of the era as Hilda Clark to take over the stimulant duties of the coca dope.

Just as I can’t really blame Coke for not wanting to trumpet the original cocaine content, I also can’t blame them for downplaying the fact that for its first 15 years or so, the drink was marketed as a “remarkable therapeutic agent,” a cure for headaches, melancholy, insomnia and hysteria. The narrative of Coke’s history presented in Cokeworld mentions that Coca-Cola was just one of a number of patent medicines brewed by “Doctor” Pemberton, such as Botanic Blood Balm and Triplex Liver Pills, but the beverage’s scruffy relations are quickly laughed aside. To me, however, this is an important point for understanding how Coke and Coke’s advertising continues to operate today.

The heritage of Coca-Cola (which was originally green) as a patent medicine places it firmly in the tradition of the Medicine Show, where some liquid concoction, some snake oil, some dope is sold to the public with the promise that along with its consumption will come all sorts of desired benefits. Originally, Coca-Cola promised relief for head-

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ache and fatigue. Today the product promises, along with life and joy, world peace. Coke itself is used as advertisement for a certain social and cultural attitude, a sort of liberal pluralism and internationalism based not on a shared mother tongue, class consciousness, or code of human rights, but a common taste for the same brand of pop, uniting us all in a vast international cargo cult: The World of Coca-Cola!

All this becomes clear to me as I notice that Coke ads and Coke history fizz with more than entertainment value. They are the dominant motifs in Cokeworld’s presentation of American, and international, social history.

Once I leave the first gallery, guided by the helpful and ebullient red-sweatered monitors, I experience yet another of Cokeworld’s ironic confessions of intent. There on the atrium bridge, I can, as the tour booklet instructs, “step inside a giant Coca-Cola can,” touch the video screen and activate a videodisc that plays selected snippets of America’s past. These snippets summarize the social history of a period, “interwoven with the history of Coca-Cola and The Coca-Cola Company.”

So grandiose is Coke’s self-image that the company does not settle for celebrating its success with mere numbers. There are, of course, plenty of novelty stats: 700,000 Coke vending machines in Japan! All the bottles ever made stacked side by side on a fourlane would wrap around the earth 81 times! But Coke’s boldest boast is its victory as a cultural icon that transcends history, equalizes class distinctions, vaporizes national boundaries, and unites all time, space, and life in a multidimensional Pax Coca-Cola.

Cokeworld’s “History in a Can” makes of politics a dance of trends, a smooth, sweet evolution of changing clothing styles and a progressive perfection of society toward the ideal Soda Fountain on the Hill. Using clever trivia, quick cuts of archival film footage and diverse, effective soundtrack, the video nuggets can history, presenting profound moments in history and equate them with developments in the alternate ever-happy unreality of Cokeworld. The effect is insidious: historical information is simplified, flattened and neutralized. As I gulp down these “Logo”-centric lessons, fascinated with the touch-screen videodisc technology, I occupy a stereotypical postmodern landscape of desire, where issues of power are suppressed, and entertainment is celebrated.

In “The New Woman,” for example, I learn that the amount of material used to make a woman’s outfit shrank from 19 1/4 yards to seven yards in 15 years, that in the 1920s women were filling new jobs, and that Coca-Cola developed the six-pack that was just perfect for those new home ice-boxes.

In “Hard Times” I’m told that in the 1930s millions were unemployed, movies became popular, and Coca-Cola advertising reflected that ol’ irrepressible human spirit

In “Festival of Dreams” I learn that immigrants by the millions came to America, and their dreams helped “weave that deeply textured tapestry we call the American expe-

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rience.” I also learn that, “These were days when the Coca-Cola company was having its own share of dreams come true…” Among those Cokedreams-come-true was the setting up of bottling plants in Nicaragua. (The U.S. Marines, in this version, don’t exist.)

And finally, in canned history lesson called “The Stopwatch and The Factory,” I hear about Henry Ford, Frederick Taylor, the assembly line, “the tyranny of the clock,” and the improved working conditions brought about by unexplained and long-finished “labor struggles.” But most important, this was when the trademark hobbleskirt bottle was introduced. The bottle is described with a phrase that is tossed off by the narrator, but which captures the essential contradictory dream logic of Cokeworld’s sacral profanity: “It was mass produced uniqueness.” While Coca-Cola’s own marketing efforts did much to spread Coke throughout the world, it was World War II that catapulted Coke into a position of global prominence, and made it a standard of democracy equal to, if not greater than, the Stars and Stripes. During the war, Robert Woodruff, the legendary head of Coke during the company’s global march, quickly found a way to get unlimited supplies of tightly rationed sugar by making Coca-Cola for the GI’s. According to a series of articles in The New Yorker in February and March of 1959, Woodruff convinced the U.S. military and the soldiers themselves that Coca-Cola was a symbol of all the sunny Saturday afternoons and dates at the soda fountain that they were fighting for. To the soldiers and the world, Coca-Cola soon became not just a symbol of the essence of American privilege and leisure, but also the magic elixir without which that leisure didn’t even exist.

The writer of The New Yorker articles, E.J. Kahn, reported that Woodruff persuaded the government that Coca-Cola bottling plants were a necessary part of an army’s hardware.

Woodruff was so successful that when General Eisenhower landed on North Africa, he ordered eight bottling plants shipped in to provide Cokes for his desert armies. And at the time of Japan’s surrender, six bottling plants were included with the first wave of American occupational troops. Before WW II there were five bottling plants overseas. By the end of the war, there were 64! And most of them were shipped there at government expense. This wartime trend gave Coke an almost unbeatable edge over any competition. Coke was such a part of the war effort that when the fighting was over, 30,000 empty coke bottles were recovered from the lagoon of one pacific island alone.

A few short years after V-E Day, European communists were decrying “Coca-Colonialism.” Critics described the drink as “halfway between the sweetish taste of coconut and the taste of a damp rag for cleaning floors.” Another equated it to “sucking the leg of a recently massaged athlete.” French wine makers forced passage of an anti-soda pop law to prevent Coke’s widespread distribution. This action caused one Georgia representative to announce that he and friends were swearing off French dressing.

The European opponents of Coca-Cola stood no chance. Coke won. And the Black Gold from the South continues to flow, an unstoppable gusher: if the amount of Coke already drunk were to flow from Old Faithful at that geyser’s current rate, it would spew for 1,577 years.

One trace of Coke’s military legacy on display at the World of Coca-Cola is a small but enormously telling mention that at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, Coke products provided at the event were delivered on a refurbished military landing craft.

The international popularity of Coca-Cola is perhaps the most significant justifying factor for the hybrid museum/amusement park/reeducation camp that is Cokeworld. This international character is trumpeted in the movie “Every Day of Your Life,” a 13-minute hallucination in which “the world comes into focus,” where the Wonderland through which we have just wandered is summarized and repeated at high bone-buzzing volume. In the movie, one of the current chief Cokeheads, Don

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Keough, appears on screen with all the full-face High-Definition avuncular terror of something produced in Oz.

Keough begins by repeating Rev. Finster’s original false promise that Heaven/Cokeworld transcends the ugly reality of money, property, and power: “You know, in the final analysis, Coca-Cola doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to you, to anyone and everyone who has ever shared a moment with a Coke.” Keough then spins out more of the illusory rhetoric about the extended family of pop that has been the theme throughout Cokeworld. “Coca-Cola is so natural to the different cultures and lifestyles in nearly 170 countries around the world. Everyday more than a million people earn their livelihood from Coca-Cola …. the largest production and distribution network in the world.”

During the film, we take a trip around Cokeworld on the back of a Coke delivery truck. We pass Arabs on camels, Kenyans in the highlands, Thai in Bangkok and Japanese at faux-rock concerts, all with a ready wave for the happy Coke delivery men. The music is equally as diverse as the cast of characters, ranging from opera, to rock, soft pop, jazz and generic-ethnic. Coke’s abduction of diversity 20 years ago (remember “I’d like to buy the world a Coke”?) has since inspired many other ad campaigns (most recently the United Colors of Benetton), but no other product, except, perhaps, Michael Jackson, can yet claim real success equal to Coke’s.

In “Every Day of Your Life,” the religious significance of Coke as a sort of quintessential primordial ooze is highlighted in a thunderous, cacophonous segment where the image on screen show workers silk-screening the words “Coca-Cola” onto crates, while a dramatic rhythmic drone pounds through the StereoSurround system with a chorus chanting “Life!” It is as though we are witnessing creation itself in the birth of the Logo(s).

This gesture of appropriating Life itself is Coke’s ultimate act of hubris. Over the past few decades Coke copywriters have successfully usyruped the language of spirituality, carefully exploiting all the nuances of the metaphor of “thirst,” and claiming for Coke all that some claim for religion: the quenching source of joy, rebirth, happiness, satisfaction, and life. The language of Coke’s advertising resonates with evangelical imagery and even includes an esoteric mystery sect of those who know the magic formula. “Only one real Coke flavor,” declares the Rev. Finster.

It is at the end of my tour through the World of Coca-Cola that the image of us visitors as bottles in a bottling plant is made literal. As the movie “Every Day of Your Life” ends, Mr. Keough invites us to have a Coke, on him. I leave the theater and enter Club Coca-Cola, where I’m offered the entire variety of Coke products, as much as I can stomach. Here is a rare treat: in the “Tastes of the World” I can sample soft drinks “not available in the U.S.” In Club Coca-Cola, the cultural diversity of the world is once again transmuted into a simple diversity of flavors. School kids dash from spigot to spigot shouting, “Come here and taste Thailand! Did you try Japan?”

But it’s not over yet. I go down from Club Coca-Cola, wiping my chin and marvelling over some of the supersweet brews drunk overseas, into the Trademart. This is the last stop in the grand bottling fantasy: here I have the Coca-Cola logo applied to me on a cap, sweatshirt or T-shirt

Once again, the reversal that led me to pay to see old Coke advertisements and to be bottled with Coke’s messages, now would have me paying money for copies of the logo, so that true to the song that is echoing in my head as I leave Cokeworld (rather, exit from one Coke dimension into another-I can never leave the world of Coca-Cola), that refreshing beverage and its sanctifying imprint can accompany me everywhere, every day of my life.

Rodger Brown is author of Party Out of Bounds: The B-52s, R.E.M. and the Kids Who Rocked Athens, Ga.

Using the Dilemma:
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. The Political Biography of an American Dilemma, by Charles V. Hamilton (Atheneum, Illustrated, 1991, x, 545 pages).
Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 27-29

To an unusually bright and already politically active law student mere weeks from completing her distinguished matriculation I happened to mention that I was reading a biography of Powell.

She had never heard of him, proving again that though little else may be eternal the generation divide is. For not so long ago, Adam Clayton Powell was, whatever he was doing, big news.

Powell is memorialized, however; perhaps not as well as he had hoped but not bad at all. A large New York State office building is named for him (the one on 125th Street, which Gov. Nelson Rockefeller had built, in response to one of the city’s recurring racial crises well in advance of anyone’s knowing what to put into it, a political decision Powell would, it is easy to suppose, have appreciated); Seventh Avenue in Harlem was renamed the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard; and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could appropriately have been named for him.

Now he has this huge biography, by Charles Hamilton, one of our leading political scientists. Hamilton is a serious scholar and teacher within an academic discipline contemporarily dominated by people doing inconsequential opinion polling or commentary on candidates’ tactics; his interests probe much more deeply into our political institutions and processes.

Professor Hamilton’s subtitle must be taken literally. This is a political study exclusively. There is no more coverage than Hamilton can avoid on Powell’s often flashy personal life, little—almost nothing—on his 42 years in the pulpit of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, the first seven as his father’s assistant. What Hamilton is interested in, and calls upon his readers to ponder, is how Powell’s political career affords clearer understanding of Myrdal’s famed “American Dilemma,” that is the “blatant contradiction” between America’s ideals and its practices toward black people.

If Powell—affluent, politically powerful, often defiantly outrageous in his behavior—might seem an unlikely exemplar, Hamilton is at pains to show that he was not. Powell was, however, not a victim. He was a politician who knew how to use the “dilemma” as a weapon. He was, in short, master of the politics of moral unease. “He had the American Dilemma tiger by the tail, and be knew precisely how vulnerable the country was to the charge of hypocrisy and moral deceit.” He never allowed his personal violation of social codes to embarrass or deter his wielding of this advantage:

He had known and experienced the begrudging societal response to racial injustices over the years. He had seen the society ignore the issue for so long, and he had seen how Southern segregationists were coddled and catered to by many in his own party. They bolted the party time and again [as he once did], and were not punished. They scuttled civil rights bills in committee or on the Senate floor for years, and were treated gingerly. Powell saw all this, and he had an additional peek into white American society….

As a white-looking black man, a marginal person, he was able to experience two quite separate worlds. Being accepted for a time as white by unsuspecting white racists early in his life, he could see the folly of racism. He could see the privileges a mere white skin brought without any obvious basis of merit…. It is quite conceivable that this “privileged perspective” infuriated him and made him even more cynical in his own personal and political life…. In a sense, he likely concluded that if he had to accept America’s toleration of the Dilemma, America would have to tolerate him also. He was entitled.

Adam Clayton Powell was elected to the House of Representatives from the Harlem District in 1944. He served almost 30 years, until his defeat in 1970 by Charles Rangel (who still holds the seat). Through seniority, he became chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee in 1961, at the start of John Kennedy’s presidency, and from that post drove through much of the educational and social legislation of the early Kennedy

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and Johnson years. In 1967, he was, after a steamy controversy, removed as chairman. That same year he was denied his seat in the House; a special election was held to choose his successor: he won it, by 86 percent of Harlem’s vote.

He declined to present himself to the House, in order not to diminish his lawsuit contesting the exclusion. Judicial proceeding moving behind the pace of events, the regular election of 1968 rolled around, and he won that, with 81 percent of the vote. This time, he took his seat. In 1969, the Supreme Court ruled that he had been unconstitutionally excluded. The next year, Harlem deserted him: “It was time to move on to other strategies with new leaders, away from Powell as the Issue,” says Hamilton. Two years later, he died.

The 1960s—up to his fall—were the years when, as an important Committee’s chair, Powell had his hands on real power; no black person in American history had risen so high in Congress, and none has since. But Powell’s more influential years were already behind him.

His time of genuine contribution was the 1950s. He had access to the Eisenhower Administration because he was willing to be used by it as apologist to and defender before the nation’s blacks (in 1954, Reader’s Digest at the White House’s request wrote a laudatory article for his byline, and published it in its October issue), and he used that access to be a sort of ombudsman for blacks countrywide who wrote complaints to him.

More important, he worked in tandem with Clarence Mitchell, the NAACP’s Washington representative. In those pre-civil rights days Mitchell, one of the true heroes of the civil rights movement, was untiring in his advocacy of such justice as could be wrung from the national government, and Powell was, as Hamilton describes, his willing accomplice and instrument, from his Congressional eminence. The NAACP “was the quarterback that threw the ball to Powell, who, to his credit, was more than happy to catch and run with it.”

It was from that partnership that the “Powell Amendments” sprung. On bill after bill that proposed federal expenditures Powell would offer “our customary amendment,” requiring that federal funds be denied to any jurisdiction that maintained segregation, Liberals would be embarrassed, Southern politicians angered. Ironically, even tragically, by 1964 when Congress enacted this principle into Title IV of that year’s great Act, Powell had become bypassed, in both the leadership of the black community and in the House.

Powell had another contribution to make during his 1940s and 1950s years in Congress, one Hamilton calls “spokesmanship.”

“Here was a person who [in the 1940s] would at least ‘speak out.’… That would be different … Many Negroes were angry that no Northern liberals would get up on the floor of Congress and challenge the segregationists. … Powell certainly promised to do that. …

“[In] the 1940s and 1950s, he was, indeed, virtually alone…. And precisely because of that, he was exceptionally crucial. In many instances during those earlier times, if he did not speak out, the issue would not have been raised. … For example, only he could (or would dare to)

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challenge Congressman Rankin of Mississippi on the House floor in the 1940s for using the word ‘nigger.’ He certainly did not change Rankin’s mind or behavior, but he gave solace to millions who longed for a little retaliatory defiance.”

One of the mighty forces that impelled the civil rights revolt was the “movement’s” occupancy of the moral high ground. The rightness of the cause was unassailable. The movement gave the nation hardly an excuse, had it wanted one and it always had before, to oppose it

Perhaps that high ground has lately been forsaken, though during the amoral 1980s that would have been hard to notice. Powell, however, never spoke from a personal moral advantage. He flaunted his desires, and their fulfillment “I wish to state very emphatically,” he said once when under attack for personal conduct (he had taken two young women at government expense with him on overseas travel) by Congress and the press, “that I will always do just what every other Congressman and committee chairman has done and is doing and will do.” In his claim and no doubt in his perception, be was the black who was like the whites, on a plane of equality with them, on the same moral low ground as they.

Charles Hamilton has written a book about a man whose career was for a while a large part of the whole story of black America’s political struggle. To tell the man’s story well would be an achievement, to relate it to the black community’s political development would be an even larger one. Hamilton does both.

He does something else, too. He wants all of us to look at Powell within the context of questions, not of who was he, but of who we are. Powell used the Dilemma—the contradiction between professed values and white America’s actual racial practices—to indict the nation for hypocrisy.

He refused to abide by what he considered a “double standard” of personal conduct, flaunted his relatively small thievery of public monies, and accused white America of hypocrisy when it objected: “I have not tarnished the name of the House through any violation of Federal laws, particularly the U.S. Civil Code governing conflicts of interest for Congressmen. Nor have I misused my position to obtain Federal contracts for corporations represented by me or by my law firm.”

It was—still is—easy to cast stones at Powell. The most serious of all his faults was that for too long, as Hamilton makes clear, he made his situation The Issue, when the nation and, in particular, black Americans urgently needed to confront larger problems. That is over. On the other hand, his indictments are still alive. Charles Hamilton has told us, by this good book, to take them seriously.

Leslie Dunbar, a former executive director of the Council and SRC Life Fellow, rallies book reviews for Southern Changes from his home in Durham, N.C.

Odyssey of a Southern Radical

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 29-30

James A. Dombrowski: An American Heretic, 1897-1983, Frank T. Adams (University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1992, 377 pages).

It’s the American Dream in another of its infinite versions: a shy youngster from Tampa, Fla., son of a Lutheran merchant, grandson of Polish immigrants, strives in high school to prove that he is an excellent and altogether worthy student. He works hard to save for college, goes off to serve in France during World War I, and then enters Georgia’s prestigious Methodist university, Emory, at its new campus in Atlanta. A fraternity man and an honor student, he is so highly regarded that the university hires him as its alumni secretary right after he graduates in 1923. Then, within six years, he is ordained into the Methodist ministry and pursues graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley, at Harvard and Columbia, and at Union Theological Seminary in New York. By the time he is 32 years old in 1929, James Anderson Dombrowski has demonstrated impressively that all things are possible in this great land, even for Southern boys with strange-sounding foreign names.

But life seldom follows a storybook course, even in America. In June 1929, Jim Dombrowski was arrested and jailed during a workers’ strike near Elizabethton, Tenn. He was accused of being a “dangerous agitator,” a Communist, even an accessory to the murder of a police officer. The charges were dropped a few hours later, but the experience had more of a lasting impact on him than 10 years of formal higher education. In fact, you might say that it was at Elizabethton that Dombrowski’s education—not to mention the altered course of his fascinating life—really got its start

It is this little-known life—this odyssey of a Southern radical of the 1930s and beyond—that social critic and biographer Frank T. Adams captures so impressively in these pages. Dombrowski was a Christian Socialist who spent his entire professional career working for racial equality and other social goals in his native South. At the Highlander Folk School, the Southern Conference for

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Human Welfare, and the Southern Conference Education Fund—three of this region’s most radical and controversial institutions of the mid-20th century—the tall, soft-spoken reformer was one of the first of a handful of white Southerners to oppose racial segregation in the generation before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Montgomery bus boycott of the mid-1950s brought the long-smoldering civil rights issue to the surface.

Dombrowski was not your average Southerner, for obvious reasons, but the South had its hooks in him just the same. When he was young and impressionable—and still deep in Dixie—the American Dream beckoned to him like the Holy Grail.

His religious commitment was awakened in him here, and it never left him. His idealism, his understanding and empathy for the black minority, his belief in the promise of democracy—all these were a part of his Southern heritage.

The great value of books like this is that they rescue from obscurity heroic and courageous people who would otherwise be lost to us forever.

The record is full of demagogues, charlatans, knaves, and scoundrels who sold us down the river in the name of mother, God, and country. Far too little is known about the men and women, white and black, who tried to tell us, long before we were disposed to listen, that segregation was a bilbo (that’s a leg iron on a slave ship, and an infamous politician’s signature), and we could only free ourselves from it by speaking the truth about democracy, equality, and justice.

Only two things mystify me about this excellent biography. One is that it took more than 25 years after Dombrowski’s retirement to bring his story into print.

The other is that the publisher would find it necessary to charge a prohibitively high price for the hardcover edition—and a hardcover price for the paperback ($49.50 and $22.50).

Too many people who need to read this book will miss it for that reason. I hope the libraries, at least, won’t pass it up, and that those who can’t afford it will go there and check it out.

One way or the other, we need to spread the word about the Frank Adams rendition of Jim Dombrowski’s life.

John Egerton’s latest book is Shades of Gray. He works now on a study of Southern racial relations during the eve of the civil rights movement.

Multum in Parvo

Reviewed by W.W. Finlator

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 30-32

Providence, Will D. Campbell (Longstreet Press, Atlanta, 1992, 292 pages)

Providence opens with a visit in 1955 by the Rev. Will D. Campbell and Professor McLeod Bryan of Mercer University to a place called Providence in Mississippi where Sherwood Eddy and Reinhold Niebuhr had set up an experiment in integration, a visit that cost Will his position as chaplain at the University of Mississippi and launched him on his strange and eventful spiritual Odyssey.

Who is Will Campbell? After writing 10 books and, for

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half a century, preaching, lecturing, protesting, agitating, singing, counseling, and traveling far and wide, we still ask who is this brooding, prophetic, and gifted man, Will Campbell. It’s easy to answer that when the Lord made him he threw away the pattern, but how would you describe the “pattern”?

Perhaps in Providence, Will, while writing of lots of others, lets us in for a heap of indirect self-disclosure, and we begin to see through a glass less darkly into the inner workings of this marvelous, multi-faceted, dreaming personality.

I mean by this that the author of this well researched history of Choctaw Indians, fur traders and pioneers, early settlers, missionaries, poor white farmers, slaves, Plantations, Civil War, Reconstruction, share-cropping, integration and the Civil Rights movement—all related to a parcel of land he repeatedly identifies as “a square mile of earth, Section Thirteen of Township Sixteen, North Range, in Holmes County, Mississippi”—is not only meticulous researcher and careful historian but also inadvertently, and certainly unintentionally, autobiographical.

And what a felicitous title! The book is about Providence Plantation, and no man in our day to my judgment has through a checkered and unchartered career of love and service been more under the guidance and governance of Providence than Will Campbell. He’s had to be.

The book is also about love. Will Campbell loves the American Indians individually and collectively, but he hates what the European Americans have done and continue to do the Indians.

He loves black Americans individually and collectively, but he is pained and outraged by the scars of slavery and segregation. He loves Southern poor whites, even when they are called rednecks, but he utterly rejects every expression of their racism. He loves the plantation elite, but he calls down the wrath of God upon their exploitation of both the poor whites and the blacks while remaining pious leaders in the church.

He loves his Baptist faith and heritage, but decries what Baptists have done to it. He loves democracy, Jeffersonian and Jacksonian, but he can never forgive Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson for their shameless parts in the forced removal of the Choctaw from Mississippi. He loves the good earth—and when it comes to a square mile of it in Holmes County, Mississippi, he venerates it—but his heart and his flesh cry out in agony and anger when the barbarians, whether individuals, corporations, or the Department of Interior, rape it.

A word we toss around today is holistic. Matthew Arnold wrote about seeing life steady and seeing it whole. Many authors in many books have told us the story of our Southland and from many points of view.

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But when it comes to telling us about 160 years of joys and griefs and despairs of red, black, and white Southerners across the sweep and surge of history from the perspective of a preacher, theologian, social prophet, philosopher, guitar singer of country, reformer, whiskey-drinking, tobacco-chewing Baptist, farmer and home maker, totally in love with life and people, providentially we have Will Campbell. Multum in parvo. So much stirring history packed in that little parcel of land in Holmes County, Mississippi.

You really ought to read this book. Some people think it’s his best.

W.W. Finlator of Raleigh, long-time Baptist Pastor and A.C.L.U. leader, is an absolutist about the Bill of Rights and the original principles of his Baptist faith (principles now despised by the heretics who control the Southern Baptist Convention.)

Nobody’s Gonna Turn Me Round

Reviewed by Michael Cooper

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 32-33

Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round: The Pursuit of Racial Justice in the Rural South (Richard A. Couto, Temple University Press, 1991, 348 pages).

Richard A. Couto’s appealingly-titled book is about the role of federally-funded health care centers in the century-plus struggle for civil rights. In Southern, rural, poor, and mostly-black communities, the centers not only provided essential, long-neglected health care; they also attracted ambitious civil rights activists. Couto is less interested in the specific benefits of health care centers than in placing them in a larger tradition of political and social reform.

He examines four different places: Haywood County, Tenn.; Lee County, Ark.; Lowndes County, Ala.; and the Sea Islands, S.C.. He divides his material into three distinct parts.

Part one of the book is oral history, 139 pages of comment from more than 40 people who describe their lives, their activism, and their relationships to local health centers.

Part two scans the history of black land ownership, education, civil rights, and health care. Couto describes accomplishments and failures during several period of major reform: Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society.

In part three, Couto theorizes on the nature of leadership in rural black communities. The first half of this section is the least interesting and most frustrating part of the book, because it is strewn with such jargon as “local community of memory,” “heroic bureaucracies,””redemptive organizations,” and “new politics of portions.” The second half of this brief section examines the successes and failures of various social reform organizations and agencies from the Freedmen’s Bureau to SNCC to the Office of Economic Opportunity.

In the introduction, Couto promised a book with “The emphasis… on the health centers as an extension of the movement to acquire civil rights.”

But he obscured this straightforward premise a couple of pages later by stating his book was “about a set of model federal programs, their relation to social movements for democratic equality and human dignity, the people who conducted both the programs and movement locally, and the impact of previous programs and movements on them.”

It is hard not to sympathize with the tone, but clearer writing, better organization, and more details would have made this book more compelling. What services were provided and to whom?

What kind of local opposition did the centers weather? Can social service organizations operate in areas of great deprivation without addressing political and economic

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issues?

The multifaceted impact of health centers in poor areas is an interesting and timely subject. One hopes Professor Couto’s future writings are more informative.

Free-lancer Michael Cooper writes often for Southern Changes.

A Call to Assembly

Reviewed by Eugene Current-Garcia

Vol. 14, No. 4, 1992, pp. 33-34

The Autobiography of a Musical Storyteller (Willie Ruff, New York: Viking, 1991. xvi, 385 pages, Black and White Photographs).

“You see, baby,” he said as he took up a Hickory House napkin and flicked a grain of shrimp fried rice from his mustache, “bread cast upon the water comes back buttered on both sides.”

Duke Ellington’s suave voice softly prepares us to savor the many delights awaiting readers of this absorbing narrative. The opening scene, displaying a memorable dinner party at a New York “jazz emporium” in 1967, sets an appropriate tone for the life story told in the book; for the Prologue, like a tangy apertif, whets the appetite for each of the five ensuing parts that present a skillfully organized symphonic arrangement of forty-four chapters and an Epilogue.

The Prologue also introduces four of the major characters whose intertwined roles provide most of the action and speech that move the story forward. Besides Duke, the Maestro, the other members of the dinner party at the Hickory House were Billy Strayhorn, Ellington’s well beloved composer/arranger of jazz music and song, and two younger musicians: Dwike Mitchell, a pianist, and his partner on the French horn and bass viol, Willie Ruff, the narrator.

From there on the Prologue focuses on the significance and fascinating development of Strayhorn’s duo Suite for Piano and Horn, to finally the climactic performance of the Suite by Dwike and Willie at a dazzling memorial concert in Lincoln Center, dedicated to Strayhorn shortly after his death in 1968. As a participant in the gigantic event, which had been organized and stage-managed personally by Ellington himself, Ruff sums up the excitement it aroused at the time. Now, “remembering it as if I had just stepped out of Strayhorn’s apartment or slipped into the wings at Lincoln Center, with Ellington’s voice shivering me in the heart,” he recognizes the core of the experience as a rite of passage, “a transition for a still young artist who had come from what seemed like nowhere, had arrived somewhere, and was going he knew not where.” Thus, in retrospect he concludes, the vision of his life’s path was revealed:

“The one thing I do know about that magical evening—about the totality of that experience with those creators and ambassadors of the music that was born and bred nowhere else but in America—is that it seemed to me a calling: a “call to assembly” was the phrase they used when I was a young army private. I knew I was on notice, and I had to heed the call.”

Implicit in these introductory words are several of the rhetorical elements that give durable substance and cumulative appeal to every segment of the ensuing life story: namely, serious thematic emphasis and striking, repetitive imagery.

Throughout the book Ruff builds up a massive structure of specific concrete details—names and dates, person, places, things, actions, recapturing in chapter after chapter the definitive sensations that enriched his mind and heart from early childhood to ripened maturity. The first dozen chapters of Part One—HOME—for example, recall the pride and joy he felt as a tiny toddler, singing W.C. Handy’s “St Louis Blues” for candy handouts in the neighborhood grocery stores of Sheffield, his birthplace in the northwest corner of Alabama; and of being taught at age four by an elderly surrogate “Daddy Long” to memorize poems, songs, and stories in books, because “book learning,” the old man assured him, was … the onliest thing white folks can’t take away from you’.” With equal fervor he recalls the excitement shared by his entire family while listening to makeshift radio broadcasts of Joe Louis’s championship bouts with Max Schmelling and Billy Conn, as well as other white challengers in the 1930s.

Having learned to read well enough by five to enter the Baptist Bottom School, he was enchanted with everything offered there for instruction, especially a visit by the famed “father of the blues,” Handy himself, who demonstrated with trumpet and passionate words for the second graders “those qualities that our sacred music shares with the blues and jazz.”

As a pre-adolescent he was equally eager to learn from his step-father, Will Pruitt, about the past and faraway places—Biblical tales of ancient warriors and later ones from America’s Revolutionary and Civil Wars; to learn the varied intricacies involved in performing suc-

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cessfully on drums, piano, and horns, as well as the skills needed to converse intelligibly in sign language. Before reaching twelve he had learned how to make money. From witnessing the maneuvers of Tuskegee’s black fighter pilots and those of their proud Air Base marching band his musical horizon further expanded while his desire to emulate them soared. But above all during the war years, he learned from both parents how to face life courageously, with dignity, resolution, and inconspicuous pride; so that not long after his mother’s death in 1945, Willie had also learned how to talk himself into the Army as a full-fledged enlistee at fourteen years of age.

Told in Part Two, Ruff’s career in the Army from 1946 to 1949 also contributed richly to his insatiable appetite for increased knowledge and technical virtuosity. While shifting from boot camp at Fort McClellan to other installations at San Francisco, Cheyenne, and ultimately, the all-black Air Force base at Lockbourne, Ohio, he acquired further expertise and sophistication. Among the most helpful were his two bandmasters at Lockbourne, but there were also such younger friends as Abe Kniaz, French hornist with the Columbus Symphony, and the brilliant young pianist, Ivory (Dwike) Mitchell, who would before long team up with Ruff professionally. Together, these men and others had ably prepared him to challenge, at seventeen, the rigors of Yale University’s School of Music with ample high school credits in the liberal arts acquired in his military training programs.

Between his entry as a freshman in 1949 and the acquisition of a master’s degree from the School of Music in 1954 at age twenty-three, several significant events had combined to produce a major transformation in his life. He had gained professional status with part-time performances in New Haven’s black entertainment jazz parlors and in the town’s symphony orchestra. He had also begun serious study of classical music under the spirited supervision of Paul Hindemith himself. An eye-opening experience, indeed, since Hindemith’s passion for the Venetian church music of the 1500s, he declared, “set up reverberations in my memory of W.C. Handy’s message to the children at my Alabama schoolhouse way back in 1937,” though he would need many more years to recognize the connection. By this time, too, his friend Abe Kniaz was firmly ensconced as French hornist in the National Symphony Orchestra at Washington, D.C., though bitterly chagrinned to have to confess that segregation would as yet prevent Ruff from securing a similar coveted position there. This was perhaps the foremost lesson that Ruff had long ago learned from his elders—how to confront the status quo realistically, without abandoning self-esteem.

Parts Four and Five, often spiced with humor and salty dialogue, carry us far afield in a whirl of the activities that have filled the last thirty years of his life. Among the more zestful of these experiences were Ruff’s audition with Conductor Eric Leinsdorf in New York and his chance reunion there with Dwike Mitchell, which resulted in their subsequent teamwork as members of Lionel Hampton’s hot jazz band at the Apollo and on their westward road trip to Las Vegas. This junketing in turn led to the successful launching at last of their Duo along with Count Basie and his famous band at the Birdland back in New York. Yet these were but a few of the gratifying adventures the two men shared later in the 1960s, as they toured the nation on their own, performing and recording their special blend of jazz, spirituals, and classical music at colleges and concert halls throughout the Middle West the West Coast, and even the Deep South.

Beginning also in 1958, word was getting round that the Duo’s brand of music might be enthusiastically welcomed by young Russian jazz buffs in Moscow. Before long, Dwike and Willie were on their way with the Yale Chorus, destined to enjoy an avid response in half a dozen Russian cities from Leningrad to Yalta, a success, Ruff notes, that “worked out beyond our wildest dream.”

Within a few years they were on their way again, to the San Remo Jazz Festival on the Italian Riviera, to other concerts in Sicily, later still in the mid-1960s to Brazil, then to the Central African Republic in 1972, and to Shanghai in 1981. Ruff’s enjoyment in each of these exotic settings was stimulated and enhanced not only by the wholehearted response accorded his music, but also by the discovery that his efforts to learn to speak the vernacular of his hosts, whether foreign or American, helped to create a genuinely mutual conviviality. By striving to talk to people in their own idiom, he was taken into their hearts as well; and they entered into his. Abundant evidence of this achievement appears in the concluding four chapters of his book, especially the forty-fourth, titled “Playing on Holy Ground.”

Literate Americans everywhere, whether devotees of jazz or not, should hearken joyfully to this “call to assembly”; but Alabamians in particular should be mighty proud of its author for writing it.

Eugene Current-Garcia was the first Phi Kappa Phi National Scholar named in 1974. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Auburn University and founding editor of the Southern Humanities Review. This review is reprinted with permission from Forum, the journal of Phi Kappa Phi.