Idle No More!

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TORONTO—The Idle No More movement, a cam­ paign for indigenous rights, democracy, and environmen­ tal justice, spread like wildfire in December in response to Conservative federal government legislation. An unprecedented wave of grassroots action is sweeping across First Nations communities. Over 100 rallies were organized locally, in particular by young people frustrated by the systemic inequality that persists across the country. First Nations people also demonstrated on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Dec. 21, to protest Bill C-45, the Stephen Harper government omnibus budget bill which fuelled the growing movement. C-45 includes changes to the Indian Act affecting how reserve lands are managed, making them easier to “develop,” and to be taken away from the First Nations’ people. The bill also removes thousands of lakes and streams from the list of federally protected bodies of water, giving the tar sands industry a green light to destroy waterways used by First Nation people.

Atiwapiskat First Nation Chief Theresa Spence (photo), who has been on a hunger strike since Dec. 11, resolved to starve herself to death unless Prime Minister Stephen Harper met to discuss treaty rights, and the relationship of the Canadian state to indigenous peoples. The demands of aboriginal peoples for decent housing, for respect of trea­ ties, for the resolution of outstanding land claims, against tar sands pipelines, to win economic development benefi­ cial to their communities, and to establish self-government are entirely just. — SOCIALIST ACTION/ LIGUE POUR L’ACTION SO­ CIALISTE (CANADIAN STATE)

Year of the Dakota MINNEAPOLIS—On Dec. 14, city council passed a resolution designating Dec. 26, 2012 to Dec. 26, 2013 as “The Year of the Dakota: Remembering, Honoring, and Truth-Telling.” The St. Paul city council will do the same when they meet on Jan. 9.

The resolution acknowledges lingering issues that in­ clude land, genocide, suppression of American Indian spirituality and languages, concentration camps, forced marches, mass executions, and forcible removals.” The year 2012 was the 150th anniversary of the Da­ kota-U.S. War, and Dec. 26 marked the 150th anniver­ sary of the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men, the largest mass hanging in U.S. history. These 38 were among the thousands rounded up at the end of the fighting (whether they participated in the fighting or not) and sentenced in military trials that often lasted only a few minutes. Lin­ coln, “the Great Emancipator” signed the order for this mass execution even as he was writing the Emancipation Proclamation. — KAREN REDNAGEL SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2013 7

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This is an abbreviated version of an article that can be viewed in its entirety at socialistaction.org.

L memory, since the day he was murdered at Ford’s Lincoln has been a giant, in the sense of historical Theater, and for some time before that. That’s why movies are made about him. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” was reportedly due to an epiphanic reading of “Team of Rivals” (2006), by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which is centered on Lincoln’s relations with his cabinet mem­ bers, and subtitled, “The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.” Eventually, the idea of constructing the film around the struggle to ratify the 13th Amendment to the Constitution emerged. Certainly, the approaching 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, made effective on Jan. 1, 1863 must have pointed in that direction.

Spielberg’s, and Daniel Day-Lewis’ depiction of Abra­ ham Lincoln is probably as close as anyone will get to the living Lincoln in a long, long time, if ever. It’s obvious that a multitude of Lincoln’s personal and physical characteristics, as well as dialogue buried in memoirs, dairies, and reminiscences were teased out and entered into the characterization presented on screen. Lincoln has narrow shoulders, he walks bent over with his hands behind his back, he laughs at his own stories, he smiles easily, he puts his legs up on a nearby chair, he tells scatological stories (one).

It happens that the story Lincoln relates, involving a visit by Revolutionary hero Ethan Allen to England after the close of the war, is attested to as one he did tell. It’s a funny story, but here is passed over without notice the conversion of a Revolutionary hero “to a harmless icon.” Everybody has heard of the exploits of the Green Mountain Boys, but who knows that Ethan Allen was a vigorous disbeliever in Christianity, and in 1785 wrote and published “Reason, the Only Oracle of Man,” described as an “unbridled attack against the Bible, established churches, and the powers of the priesthood.” Lincoln, a life-long Freethinker and Deist, probably knew.

Still, even here, Lincoln is considerably cleaned up from what can be clearly deduced from the plethora of sources about him. Although Day-Lewis deliberately pitches his character’s voice in an upper register tenor, and uses a mild form of Lincoln’s upper South accent (he says “cheerman” instead of “chairman,” and, oc­ casionally, “ain’t”), the most often stated impression of Lincoln’s voice was that was not just “tenor,” but “shrill, high pitched, raw.”

8 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2013 Spielberg’s “Lincoln” spans Janu­ ary to April 1865. At its center is the struggle to get a 2/3 vote in the House of Representatives adopting the 13th Amendment to the Constitu­ tion, outlawing slavery forever. The Amendment had failed to pass the House when first introduced in April 1864, although it was approved by the Senate, and was moved for re­ consideration in January 1865. To become effective, the amendment then had to be approved by ¾ of the state legislatures. Under the cir­ cumstances prevailing at the time, it was clear that the major hurdle was winning in the House of Representa­ tives, in a forum that had already re­ jected it. If successful, it was gener­ ally believed approval by the states would follow quickly, which it did, before the end of the year 1865.

Following a struggle over a fiercely contested piece of legislation, from introduction to eventual approval as the votes are counted one by one, provides a nice dramatic setting, or­ ganically building to an exuberant climax and emotional release of tension. In the film “Amazing Grace” (2006), the parliamentary battle to pass a bill banning the British slave trade mounts to a similar crescendo, as William Wilberforce finally ob­ tains enough votes to prevail.

Spielberg didn’t direct “Amazing Grace,” but he did direct “Amistad,” another film concerned with a pow­ erful event related to the enslavement of Africans in the 19th century—the capture of the slave ship La Amistad by its kidnapped passengers.

Both these films by Spielberg are magnificently staged and photographed, and powerfully acted. And in both of them, the final and decisive arenas of action depicted are the institutions of white people—John Quincy Adam’s defense of the rebel African captive, Cinque, before the Supreme Court in 1841, and the vote in the House of Representatives on Jan. 31, 1865.

There are appearances by people of African descent in “Lincoln” (not many, almost cameos), but they are clearly inserted as surrogates for major pieces of his­ tory. Early in the film, Lincoln has a colloquy with two Black soldiers, who pause as Black and white troops are passing in formation by the White House on the way to war. One of the two is quite assertive, articu­ lating some of the main grievances of the colored sol­ diers: Unequal pay with white troops—No Black offi­ cers. Lincoln is cordial but noncommittal.

The scene ends with the less assertive Black soldier reciting the Gettysburg address, and a white soldier joining in. Whether this strikes the viewer as ludi­ crous or moving, it is obviously an expository device to acknowledge, very briefly, the presence of Black troops and their grievances.

Later in the film, actually Jan. 29, 1865, three mem­ bers of a Confederate delegation travel secretly north to meet with Lincoln to discuss possible terms of peace. One of them is Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, who Lincoln knew well when they both were in Congress in the 1840s. “Alec,” he calls him. As the three commissioners step out of their curtained carriage, they see assembled, for the first time, a regiment of African American troops. Their stunned reactions are palpable—this is the new order.

When the day arrives for the vote in the House of Representatives, the film depicts a large contingent of African Americans entering and seating themselves in the gallery. There is a visible reaction by the (all white) Representatives on the floor, another brief expository moment. Also present together in the gallery are Eliza­ beth Keckley, Mary Lincoln’s African American dress­ David James / Dreamworks, 20th Century Fox (Above) Daniel Day Lewis as “Lincoln.”

maker, and Mrs. Lincoln.

At another point, Lincoln has a brief conversation on the White House steps with Keckley, the most extend­ ed appearance in the film by a person of African de­ scent. He addresses her as “Mrs. Keckley.” At that time in history (and later), a typical white person, especial­ ly one of Southern extraction, who wanted to address a mature African American woman with a modicum of decency would have probably called her “Auntie,” or “Aunt Elizabeth.” So the filmmakers seek to make a subtle point here. But Keckley, in her memoir, says Lincoln always addressed her as “Madame Elizabeth.” “My friend Douglass!”

Some historically informed viewers have asked themselves, “Where is Frederick Douglass?” Douglass visited Lincoln at least three times, including one visit that falls within the time span of the film. Seeking to at­ tend the post-inaugural reception at the White House, Douglass was initially turned away by the doorkeep­ ers because of his color. Someone got word to Lincoln that Douglass was present and he was admitted.

Douglass remembered Lincoln, who was “stand­ ing like a mountain pine high above the others, in his grand simplicity and home-like beauty.” Lincoln demonstratively greeted him, “Here comes my friend Douglass!” Taking him by the hand, Lincoln said, “I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd today, listen­ ing to my inaugural address. How did you like it? … You must stop a little, Douglass; there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what you think of it.”

“Mr. Lincoln,” Douglass said, “that was a sacred ef­ fort.” Douglass was known for saying exactly what he thought. But the scene was left on the cutting room floor, or more accurately, never filmed.

The adoption of the 13th Amendment by the House codified the effective consensus of the rulers of the Union that the destruction of the slave system—the expropriation without compensation of the $2 billion of invested capital embodied in the persons of four million human beings—was the necessary and only acceptable outcome of the war. In and of itself this was a revolutionary act. It was not negotiated, it was un­ equivocal and it was guaranteed by military force. It, was, as been said, the Second American Revolution.

“A revolution,” Frederick Engels said, “is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by the means of rifles, bayonet, and cannon.” Or, as Lincoln said to a visiting delegation of preachers, “Friends, I agree with you in Providence, but I believe in the Providence of the most men, the largest purse, and the longest cannon.”

And a revolution has its own logic. “A revolution,” Peter Kropotkin wrote in his history of the French Revolution, “is a swift overthrow, in a few years, of institutions which have taken centuries to root in the soil, and seem so fixed and immovable that even the most ardent reformers hardly dare attack them in their writings. It is the fall, the crumbling away in a brief period, of all that up to that time composed the essence of social, religious, political and economic life in a nation.”

The chief agent, director, and organizer of the pas­ sage of the Amendment by the House was Abraham (continued on page 9)

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Lincoln, utilizing every prerogative and advantage ac­ cruing to him as president. One of the contributions to authentic history that “Lincoln” does make is that it shows this. The depiction of this maneuvering, ca­ joling, bribing, and threatening is probably the most entertaining interlude in an otherwise pretty somber “Lincoln,” with a cast of characters passing across the screen from weasely Copperhead Democrats, to sur­ reptitious Dickensian henchmen and veteran political manipulators—notably the Secretary of State, Wil­ liam Seward.

Most striking, to me, at least, is the scene where Lin­ coln relentlessly demands action and more action of his knavish squadron as the vote is getting down to the wire, and, rising up to what seems like several inches above his actual 6’4” span, tells them, “I am president of the United States, clothed with great power. The abolition of slavery by constitutional provision settles the fate, for all coming time, not only of the millions now in bondage, but of unborn millions to come—a measure of such importance that those two votes must be procured. I leave it to you to determine how it shall be done; but remember that I am president of the United States, clothed with immense power, and I expect you to procure those votes” (emphasis in the film). This, at least, is what Massachusetts Congress­ man John B. Alley remembered he said, and Kushner’s script follows Alley’s account almost word for word.

The drama is intensified as the votes are counted on Jan. 31. It was known the Republicans, the majority of the House, would vote yes. But ratification required a 2/3 vote. The necessity was to bring over affirma­ tive votes from the pro-slavery Democrats. Finally the Amendment is adopted—by five votes. There is wild cheering, and the artillery booms in Washington in celebration. This actually happened.

Early life among the “Scrubs”

From his earliest youth, Lincoln was a fascinating and magnetic figure to those close to him. He was an organic natural leader of those around him. Lincoln was the wittiest, most entertaining, good-natured of them, a voracious reader with a total of three months formal education, and a person respected for his in­ tegrity and moral character.

When Lincoln volunteered for service in the Illi­ nois militia during the brutal ethnic cleansing of the Blackhawk War of 1832, he was unanimously elected captain of his company. He was always physically the strongest; meeting him for the first time in the White House, William Russell, correspondent for the London Times, remembered a “sinewy, muscular yellow neck” and a head covered with a “thatch of wild republican hair.” When Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, viewed him on his deathbed across from Ford’s The­ ater, he was struck by Lincoln’s powerful arms, ex­ posed as his clothing lay in disarray, and by the fact that Lincoln’s body was too long for the bed.

Lincoln chopped his own firewood and did other manual labor up until he left Springfield for Washing­ ton in 1861 at age 52. His origins in extreme poverty, of course, have been told so often as to exist seeming­ ly only as parody of 19th century sentimentalism. But only at a distance. “I belonged,” Lincoln said, “to what they call down South the ‘Scrubs;’ people who do not own land and slaves are nobody down there.” He once said there wasn’t much to tell about his life, other than “the short and simple annals of the poor.”

The movement of people from the Upper South across the Ohio River into free territory was more heterogeneous than usually depicted. Many of the “Scrubs,” whatever their racial views, were deeply resentful of slavery. Others, obviously a small minor­ ity, but still significant, were slaveholders who moved north to manumit their slaves. A significant and active minority, a vanguard, were conscious abolitionists.

My great-great grandfather George W. Jones, a Scrub, was born in South Carolina in 1804, and emigrated north with his family from Kentucky about the same time the Lincolns did, proceeding in 1822 to the lead mines in present day southwest Wisconsin, part of the vast lead-bearing region centered on Galena, Ill.

Like Lincoln, he enrolled in local militia during the Blackhawk War. When the Civil War began, he joined the Union Army at age 58, along with his son, who had been living in south Texas. I know what they fought for, at least. In a message to his descendants, written just before he died at age 97, he told them, “Remem­ ber the words of the immortal Lincoln, ‘Labor is prior to Capital and deserving of the higher consideration.’”

Lincoln’s election in 1860, apart from his personal abilities, which were considerable, expressed the rapid political emergence of the western region north of the Ohio River, and its determination to oppose the extension of slavery.

What the new region represented, Karl Marx ob­ served, was “that a new power had arisen, the North­ west, [i.e., the new states that comprised the area of Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Indiana, Illinois, Wis­ consin, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan], whose popula­ tion, having almost doubled between 1850 and 1860, was already pretty well equal to the white population of the slave states—a power that was not inclined ei­ ther by tradition, temperament or mode of life to let itself be dragged from compromise to compromise in the manner of the old Northeastern states. The Union was still of value to the South only so far as it handed over Federal power to it as a means of carrying out a slave policy. If not, it was better to make the break now” (Die Presse, Oct 25, 1861, Marx and Engels Col­ lected Works, vol. 17).

And Marx wrote, this time in the New York Tribune (Nov 7, 1861), [We] “know that the Southern slaveoc­ racy commenced the war with the declaration that the continuance of slaveocracy was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union. … A fight for the continuance of the Union is a fight against the con­ tinuance of the slaveocracy—that in this contest the highest form of popular self-government till now real­ ized is giving battle to the meanest and most shame­ less form of man’s enslaving recorded in the annals of history.”

Here Marx places the insurrection of the slaveoc­ racy in a world-historic context, and here, I think, his thoughts are congruent with Lincoln’s, and a key to a full understanding of the enormous voluntarist hu­ man sacrifice made for the Union, by both Black and white. Lincoln expressed it once like this, to his friend James Scovell, “Of the two great efforts to enslave the human race in body and mind [not “soul,” note] the first met its grave 200 years ago under Cromwell at Marston Moor and the second at Gettysburg.” For Lin­ coln, and for Marx, the Civil War was, in its defense of “the highest form of popular self-government till now realized,” preserving the precious possibility of (Above) Slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass visited Lincoln but was left out of Spielberg’s film.

(Left) Soldier from U.S. Colored Troops.

(Below) Nicholas Biddle, perhaps the first soldier wounded in the Civil War. On April 18, 1861, he was hit on the head by a brick thrown by a proConfederate mob as his volunteer unit marched through Baltimore. The next day, President Lincoln, reviewing the troops, asked Biddle about his wound.

its extension.

The 19th century was woven through with great struggles to overturn absolutism, clericalism, and suppression of the most elementary human rights. The impact of the American and French Revolutions of the late 18th century still reverberated among the masses, certainly in the United States. Foreign travel­ ers passing though the U.S., especially in the first half of the 19th century, all noted that the common people were alive with the politics of democracy, vigilant and assertive of their rights as free citizens (limited to white men), and inspired by a concept of a worldwide revolution against tyranny, monarchy, and priestly su­ perstition. Hundreds of thousands were immigrants and refugees from the revolutions of Europe.

“The war,” Lincoln said, “cannot be successful unless all the parties in the country are represented in the army. If only Republicans are in the army, the war will be a failure, but if the Republicans, the Democrats, the Know-Nothings, and the Socialists are in the army, we shall be saved.”

How did it come to Lincoln’s attention that “the So­ cialists” were a political current substantial enough to be included here? Most likely, socialism had come to Lincoln’s attention in association with German im­ migrants, who were massively present in Illinois. In the 1850s Lincoln actually purchased the building, type, presses and other equipment of a German news­ paper in Springfield, holding it in reserve for a future campaign. Two hundred thousand natives of Germany fought in the Union Army, about equal to the number of colored troops. Some of the leading officers in the Union Army were Germans who were, or had been, members of the First International, like General Jo­ seph Wedemeyer.

Why did a million white yeomen go off to war against the Confederacy? Whatever sympathy they had for their Black countrymen languishing under slavery was uneven and mixed, where it existed at all. But it is a certainty that the heroic and extended political agitation against slavery by a committed minority of Blacks and whites had created a vein of moral cer­ tainty that invested them with extraordinary courage, commitment, and self-sacrifice, and a sense of defend­ ing something tangible and of real value.

In all of Lincoln’s speeches arguing that slavery should be restricted to its then present boundaries, which obviously carried with it the corollary that the settlement of new territories should be white, he says over and over again that slavery should be restricted because it is “wrong.” “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” When he says this, and he says it through­ out Illinois in 1858 to the broad masses who come to hear his debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln is greeted with cheering and applause by his auditors.

For the slave, who had no access to self-government in the most minimal form, and to self-determination only by running away, the Civil War, which divided the master classes, was an opportunity that was seized immediately. It was the autonomous movement of hundreds of thousands of African Americans away from slavery and toward freedom, what W.E.B. DuBois called the “general strike,” which broke the stalemate in the war.

The mass enrollment of men of African descent into the Union army, beginning in 1863, gave this initial movement great temporal and moral power. It began to melt the glacier of racial hatred built up over 200 years. And the intervention of the most active compo­ nent of the white population, notably in their massive (continued on page 11, in “Post-election analyis by Glenn Ford: Obama and the Black community”)

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website: http://socialistaction.ca the employer for over two months. The parties did not reach an agreement by the deadline of Dec. 14. OPSEU proposed that negotiations continue into the new year.

OPS members are aware of the employ­ er’s demands. They include a wage freeze for two years (a loss of income of nearly 8% when inflation and annual increases are taken into account), salary changes that produce wages 3% lower at the be­ ginning of the pay grid than current lev­ els, and which will affect young workers dramatically, especially when combined with the freeze. the morning of Jan. 26—possibly to block building entrances. The convention will select the next premier of the province. A general election is expected in April