Archive

chauvinism

Texas History, Really!

September 13, 2022
chauvinism, civil rights, democracy, history, politics
Leave a comment

Book Review: Horne, Gerald, “The Counter Revolution of 816: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism.” International Publishers, 2022. Available through Amazon Books

University of Houston Professor Gerald Horne has created a book that must be read. I wholeheartedly recommend it, but that doesn’t make it an easy read.

I believe there is a long-awaited tendency toward truth in Texas history. Most of us have only seen the bleached and romanticized version. It makes great romantic heroes of all the “revolutionary” “founders” of the state. Everyone who can read knows it isn’t true. If they were really such wonderful people, why did they prominently feature slavery in their first constitution?

As far as I know, though, the new revisionist histories lead up gradually to the truth and don’t actually denounce any of the Texas “heroes” before their conclusions. Gerald Horne starts there. The “founders” of Texas are ratfink landgrabbers devoted to genocide for natives and enslavement for Africans from page one.

“Father of Texas” Austin wasn’t a saint trying to find homes for poor settlers. A slave owner himself, he worked constantly and consistently to overcome his host country’s ban against slavery. He was the slaveocracy’s front man. The ones who followed were no less committed to slavery and even more bloodthirsty in its pursuit.

As for the Natives, there were only two ideological trends in Texas: the few “liberals” wanted to put them all into bantusland reservations as in apartheid South African; the majority, including President Mirabeau Lamar, wanted to kill every last one of them. Mexican Americans received little more consideration. The Texas Rangers were an equestrian version of Murder, Inc.

From the first white settlers until modern times, Texas history is a story of lynching and genocide. For good measure, Horne throws in some little-known truths about Oklahoma and the states that were created after the greatest land grab — usually known as the Mexican War.

Most white Texans supported secession from Mexico. Many of them coveted even more Mexican land and only reluctantly joined the United States when forced by economic circumstances. Nearly all of them supported seceding from the union over the slavery issue in 1860. Their contributions to the Confederacy exceeded every state except, possibly, Virginia. After General Lee surrendered in 1865, many Texans moved to Mexico where they supported the French imperialist forces under “Emperor” Maximillian because they hoped to re-start the Civil War with France on their side.

The total destruction of previous Texas histories is one reason that “The Counter Revolution of 1836” is hard reading. Texas history as we have known it is deservedly turned inside-out! The other reason comes from Horne’s writing style. A few pages into the 575-page opus, the reader starts hoping that Horne will run out of obscure pejoratives to describe early Texans, but he doesn’t. He rarely employs a sentence that wouldn’t diagram as compound/complex. Because he has assembled so many quotes from so many sources, he hop-scotches from one to the other so quickly that it’s not always easy to remember what point he was making.

The book has a tremendous list of resources. Oddly, I did not find Randolph Campbell’s “An Empire for Slavery” among them. Possibly, Campbell may have been too easy on Texas.

–Gene Lantz

I’m still on KNON.org with “Workers Beat” every Saturday at 9 AM Central Time. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site

Learning From Tioga

January 24, 2022
chauvinism, civil rights, democracy, elections, history, politics
Leave a comment

Tioga is 50 miles north of Dallas. Politically, it may be in another world.

When we made our little road trip, the first thing we noticed were the big campaign signs for Don Huffines hanging on barbed wire fences. He seems to think that Governor Abbott is a liberal. HIs main slogan for getting votes in rural areas, based on an outright lie, seems to be “Stop Giving Our Money to Illegals!”

Our second clue came when we arrived at Tioga and stopped for barbecue. By the way, we liked the food, and apparently lots of other people like it, because the crowd was pretty good for a town with population 803. While we were scarfing it down, though, we noticed that we hadn’t seen a mask anywhere on the trip. Pandemic or not, they just don’t wear them up around Tioga!

Tioga is the birthplace of the great singing cowboy

After the restaurant, we tried to fit in by taking off our masks for our walking tour. We went right down Gene Autry street. We thought there might be some kind of statue, plaque, or other tribute to the great singing cowboy who is, among many other things, who I’m probably named after. The tribute is probably there, because being the birthplace of Gene Autry is Tioga’s only claim to fame, but we couldn’t find it. Right next to the street sign where we paused for a photo, a sign hung from a tree: “Trump: Make America Great!”

By then, we city people had begun to get a little uneasy. A couple of blocks further, we saw our first “Trump 2024” yard sign of this political year. By the time we got to Race Street and saw a certain house, we were downright nervous.

Stars and Bars flies in Tioga

When we saw the confederate flag and the posted threat of violence, we decided that it might be good to get back to the car before anybody noticed my “Bernie” bumper sticker. As soon as we got back to City Hall, where we had parked, we checked the car for possible painted swastikas. Then we got out of Tioga.

Does anybody remember when Adolf and Barack made a joint statement?

On the way home, we wondered if there were any dark-skinned people in Tioga. More importantly, we wondered why people in the rural areas of Texas seem committed to the Republican Party despite all facts and information. We think it might be racism.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” radio talk show at 9AM Central Time every Saturday. KNON posts my weekly blog “Workers Beat Extra” Wednesdays on http://soundcloud.com. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site.

Nellie Bly: Amazing Woman!

September 20, 2021
chauvinism, history, politics
Leave a comment

Book Review: Kroeger, Brooke, “Nellie Bly, Daredevil. Reporter. Feminist” Times Books, New York, 1994

These are 510 astonishing pages from the life of a person of excess. Whether or not one likes and appreciates everything about Nellie Bly, they would have to agree that she did more and went further than any woman of her time. From around 1890 until her death in 1922, the nation and much of the world followed her from one incredible adventure into another one even more drastic.

Elizabeth Jane “Pink” Cochrane was re-named Nellie Bly when editors were assigning her to find out about scandalous treatment of patients in a mental institution. To investigate, she went crazy and let everybody know about it. While she was undergoing “treatment,” she interviewed and observed patients and staff, then lowered the boom on the entire operation. That was just a beginning.

Before she was through, she had been filthy rich and desperately poor, despised and applauded, deceived and honored. When she began, hardly any women had regular jobs in the news industry. The few women employed at all were assigned gossip columns and society news only. When she passed, one of her eulogists called her simply “the best reporter in America.”

Bly served a time as an industrialist with 1,500 employees in her factory. She invented, and held the patent, for steel barrels. To her credit, she took a utopian attitude toward the treatment of her employees. At another time, she championed the Seamen’s Union. Toward the end of her life, she was especially well known for helping poor widows and orphans.

On the negative side, she supported the aristocracy of Austria all through World War I and afterward. She greatly admired Kaiser Wilhelm. She went out of her way to oppose the Russian Revolution and encouraged President Wilson to help combat “Bolshevists.” Her no-holds-barred approach to business, and everything else, must have made many enemies. In this book, though, any rough edges that Bly may have had could be excused by the anti-woman kind of world she lived in. She would never have succeeded at anything without being tough!

The book is good for explaining the historical setting that Bly had to contend with. It especially clarifies the early days of women’s battle for a place in the world of news. A few other newswomen succeeded during Bly’s life, but no one smashed the glass ceiling as thoroughly as Nellie Bly.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” talk show every Saturday at 9AM. KNON podcasts it and my “Workers Bet Extra” on Soundcloud.com on Wednesdays. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site.

Don’t Scream, Analyze

January 8, 2021
chauvinism, civil rights, democracy, economy, history, politics, strategy
Leave a comment

The rich rulers of America have not chosen fascism at this time. That’s the only reason we don’t have it yet.

Today’s endless stream of denunciations of the January 6th fascist riots in Washington are excellent as far as they go. All of them blame Donald Trump. Some of them call for his removal. Some call for the removal of Senator Cruz and the other Republicans within Congress who provided the “legitimate” cover for the rioters and looters. One of those Republicans made videos of himself breaking into the Capitol with the rioters!

But every outraged denunciation I have read so far misses the point. The January 6th fascist uprising is just one of many such outrageous political acts around the world. There is a universal fascist movement, and it is gaining power.

Like any political development, there are reasons for the burgeoning fascism. Those who lay the blame on individual demagogues, even truly disgusting opportunists like Donald Trump, haven’t made a proper analysis. Without a proper analysis, a practical remedy is impossible.

The root of the crisis is unbounded inequality. The prevailing economic system is making the rich obscenely richer and the poor even poorer. Logic infers that the remedy is a different system, but there has been inadequate leadership in that direction. Instead, the world’s discontented are being channeled toward racism and supernationalism.

Instead of understanding that the system we live in can only make inequality worse and does not have the capacity to do otherwise, we are told to blame peoples of other nations, ethnicities or skin coloring.

Racists rioted and attacked their capitol in Germany last August. They rioted and attacked their capitol in Washington in January.

As we live in the U.S., we must primarily concern ourselves with the fascists here at home. They are not so hard to understand, because their political tendency has always existed and was made most clear during the American Civil War. They lost that war but won the peace and continued to dominate people of color.

Their political home was the Democratic Party until the civil rights movement became victorious (1965). After that, the Dixiecrats re-aligned with the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan announced his run for the presidency in a notorious racist town, Philadelphia, Mississippi. Powerful Senator Phil Graham of Texas quickly changed from Democrat to Republican, as did many other reactionaries.

But the Republican alliance of rulers and racists was always unstable. It only needed the pinch of a worsening crisis and an unstable demagogue like Donald Trump to split the coalition with violence. The racists ransacked the Capitol, the rulers piously tried to pull their skirts up out of the muck they had created. In the immediate future, they will likely emphasize their other political party.

That is what happened on January 6th, and it is far from over.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s ‘Workers Beat’ program at 9AM Central Time every Saturday. We also podcast “Workers Beat Extra” on Soundcloud.com. If you are curious about what I really think, take a look at my personal web site

American Fascists

June 16, 2020
chauvinism, democracy, history, politics, strategy
Leave a comment

Book Review:

Hart, Bradley W. “Hitler’s American Friends. The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States.” St Martin’s Press, NY, 2018

A highly successful German spy and propagandist officed with a U.S. Senator in the Capitol. At least three senators cooperated in letting the spy use their franking privileges (envelopes with stamps) to disseminate articles from the Congressional Record from Senate speeches that were originally written by the spy himself!

Literally millions of Americans subscribed to fascist literature and radio broadcasts. One of the most popular men in America, aviator Charles Lindburgh, was the main spokesperson for Hitler’s American Friends.

Lindburgh, and a lot of the other people mentioned in the book, may have been more committed to non-intervention, pacifism, or isolationism more than they were to Hitler himself; consequently there is a lot of gray area. In the late 1930s, there were lots of non-interventionists, including many liberals and the Communist Party itself. There were also a lot of anti-semite Jew-haters, including Lindbergh and the great industrialist, Henry Ford.

In basic statistics, probably the largest part of Hitler’s American Friends were simply German immigrants who continued to favor their homeland, right or wrong.

Other than the many paid spies and saboteurs, most of the Americans who assisted Hitler could claim some other ideological motivation. Hardly any of them faced any serious punishment after the war.

One of the prominent persons who suffered only from a tarnished reputation was labor leader John L. Lewis, founding leader of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). His motivations seemed to be non-interventionism and dislike for President Roosevelt. Strike action during the war, when almost all unions took a wartime no-strike pledge, further subtracted from Mr. Lewis’ patriotic credentials.

How far did the pro-Hitler movement get? Author Bradley Hart speculates that the Republicans may have gone far if they had chosen Lindbergh as their presidential candidate in 1940. But who really knows?

I was more interested in the long list of U.S. corporations that cooperated with the Hitler regime. Henry Ford led the list. He is also named as Hitler’s largest American financial contributor in another very good book, “Who Financed Hitler.” Ford accepted Germany’s second highest medal of honor from Nazis! But General Motors, in Hart’s book, was hardly less guilty than Ford in cooperating with and profiting from the Nazi era. Coca-Cola and IBM were deeply involved, too. Did you know that Fanta was originally created for the Nazi Germany market?

History is probably not the main reason people will have for reading this book. We want to compare American fascism from another period with what is going on today. Right now, we want to know, how many Americans would accept fascism as the way to govern our country? Your guess?

–-Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” radio talk show every Saturday at 9 AM Central Time. They podcast the program and my other rants on Soundcloud.com. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site.

Our Failure in the Upsurge

June 1, 2020
chauvinism, civil rights, democracy, economy, elections, environment, politics, strategy, unions
Leave a comment

Around the world, more people are in motion today than at any time since the early 1970s. The flash point was the police murder of Mr George Floyd in Minneapolis. There are demonstrations all over the planet, and some of them are quite militant. But do they have a plan?

Police brutality is hardly the only issue. Planet-wide, we are in an economic downturn that looks to become worse than the Great Depression. Any chance of saving Earth from environmental disaster is ticking away. The fascists among us are overwhelming our democracy. We are dying everywhere of a pandemic that is not, whatever the politicians might say, under control. All hope of international cooperation seems destroyed by President Trump. World war may be imminent. To put it succinctly, the system is breaking down.

Answers, Anyone?

I seek answers. As a talk radio host, I get to listen to a lot of heartfelt complaints. I ask them, “What should we do? What is the solution?” But they don’t know.

Social media is full of the same. Unending complaints about the world we live in; almost no positive suggestions. To be sure, the electoral enthusiasts among us continue to ask people to vote. I certainly agree with them, but I wouldn’t want to stand in front of the angry throngs of America today and say that my sole answer to their swollen anger is “vote Democrat in 2020.” They have heard that many times before, and they aren’t buying it.

The radicals among us, on both sides of the spectrum, aren’t connecting. One gentleman called our talk show and said that we need to re-institute segregation. What an awful person, but at least he had a plan! The so-called leftists call in and say that we have to “fight imperialism” or “smash the state.”  They’re probably right, but those are long-term goals, not prescriptions for the here and now.

Labor Turns Away

Just about the best of the down-to-Earth solutions being posed has just slipped away from us. The AFL-CIO national labor federation had called for a “Day of Action” June 3 to win passage of the HEROES Act in Congress. The Act would greatly ameliorate the economic crisis. It would also help with the political crisis by providing more money for electoral reform. But, alas, just today, the national leadership postponed the Day of Action.

They sent out a statement that was very good, but didn’t really explain why they postponed their actions for June 3. It may well have been a result of last night’s attack on National AFL-CIO Headquarters in Washington DC. Windows were broken and a fire was set! We might assume that they believed that the June 3 Day of Action would invite more thuggery.

I absolutely loved the Tweet sent out by the President of the Central Labor Council in Sioux Falls, South Dakota: “It hurts to see damage being done to the @AFLCIO headquarters. But I believe it brings to light two facts: 1) The people did not recognize the building as the headquarters of a movement that fights for them 2) That is our fault.

In my opinion, the labor leadership made a major mistake. If labor is truly in solidarity with the anti-racists on the street, we should be on the street with them. Others are marching without condoning violence and looting, why shouldn’t we?

Another possibility is that the AFL-CIO does not want to risk being seen as anti-police because they generally welcome organized police associations into labor’s organizations. Some of us think that, too, is a mistake.

By calling off the Day of Action, our labor federation turns down the opportunity to lead the progressive movement in a positive direction. Our demand to pass the HEROES Act might not solve all of America’s problems, but it certainly goes in the right direction. Further, our demand had the distinction of being just about the only reasonable positive demand being proposed!

OUR FAILURE

Vandals vandalize, looters loot, and America’s great and powerful progressive movement continues milling around leaderless! That’s our failure.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON radio’s “Workers Beat” talk show every Saturday at 9 AM Central Time. The podcasts are on Soundcloud. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site

The Death of Ella May

February 25, 2020
art, chauvinism, civil rights, history, strategy, unions
Leave a comment

Book Review:

Cash, Wiley, “The Last Ballad.” William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2017

Two pages of the book’s afterword, 371-2, reprint everything that is actually known about American labor’s great heroine known usually as Ella May Wiggins. A little more is known about the Gastonia textile strike of 1929. This author uses what is known to weave together a fine piece of historical fiction that certainly satisfies my own high regard for Ella May.

Four of Ella May’s nine children died from pellagra and whooping cough. The one in her womb died with her when she was murdered by strikebreakers. The living children went to an orphanage. The men charged with murder were defended by the mill owners and found innocent.

Ella May’s story is not a happy one, but it is important. Whether she did or didn’t do all the things in this book, historians agree that she stood up for integrating the African American and Caucasian strikers. This was a long time before black/white unity began to pay off in victories for working families. Ella May was a pioneer as well as a martyr.

There are details of her short life, March-1900 to Sept 14-1929, on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_May_Wiggins

The author was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in the area where the strike and the murders took place. With this book, he won the Southern Book Prize for Literary Fiction and my heartfelt gratitude.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON radio’s “Workers Beat” program every Saturday at 9AM Central Time. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site

Sweating Through Layoffs

January 29, 2019
chauvinism, economy
Leave a comment

Theater Review: “Sweat” Written by Lynn Nottage and Directed at the Dallas Theater Center by Tim Bond. Run ends Feb 10

When jobs disappear, do we disappear too?

My theater buddy and I couldn’t stop talking about “Sweat” after we saw it. The play covers a handful of workers who socialized together through the period 2000-2008. If you’re old enough to remember, those were hard times for factory workers who had made a decent living previously.

The background is layoffs. For these workers, and for millions of Americans, the layoffs and cutbacks seemed as meaningless as they were devastating. Lots of people were hit, hardly anybody knew why. Usually, we talk about these things with statistics and graphs, but this play talks about it in terms of people.

Layoffs and cutoffs created desperation, and desperation brought alienation. Alienation created hate. Many of us have seen it up close. It takes many forms such as: wife abuse, jealousy, divorce, estrangement, substance abuse, and all the ugly forms of chauvinism.

With a handful of friends, “Sweat” demonstrates several of the tragedies. Multiply it by millions and you’ll have America’s working class.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” radio program at 9 AM every Saturday Central Time. They podcast it on Itunes. If you are curious about what I really think, see my personal web site

What Do You Do When There’s No Election?

November 26, 2018
chauvinism, democracy, history, politics, strategy, women
Leave a comment

Important as they are, elections are just battles within a much greater war. With the mid-terms over, we now have opportunities to organize working families.

Here in Dallas, for example, there’s an action against Trump’s proxy war in Yemen on Monday. There will be more. Christmas and New Years’ are great times for social organizing. The nationwide coalition watching the Mueller investigations may be calling more street actions any day now. The MLK birthday falls on a Tuesday next year. The event with the most potential is the Women’s March set for Saturday, January 19.

January 19, 2016, was the biggest day of protest in American history. Women set the pace, but all kinds of issues were included in the giant marches all over the nation. None of those issues has been resolved. In fact, the outlook has generally worsened; consequently, one might expect January 19, 2019, to surpass the 2016 events.

Here are two more good reasons for expecting an even bigger protest in 2019:

  1. The worldwide situation is causing unprecedented demonstrations in other parts of the world. Americans are learning from them
  2. Success inspires more success, and the number of women elected to Congress in 2018 set a new record.

Starting now, let’s add a third reason for a big turnout on January 19: you and I are already started working on it!

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON’s “Workers Beat” program 89.3FM in Dallas at 9 AM Central Time every Saturday. They podcast on Itunes. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my tacky little personal web site