The New Jim Crow in the First State

Is Jim Crow alive in the USA and in Delaware in particular? In this era of the Civil Rights Act, affirmative action, and an Obama in the White House, do we still live under a system of laws designed to keep the black man down? That is what Michelle Alexander charges in her explosive new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Piecemeal reforms and timid civil rights activism, she argues, must give way to a sweeping transformation, based on a recognition of the massive injustice against black America and on compassion for the stigmatized young African American male.

If she’s right, what does that say about the First State? Is it possible that the terrible gun violence afflicting Wilmington can be traced to the War on Drugs and how it has disenfranchised a generation of black youth? Is it possible that black youth, labeled felons, unable to find work, and ineligible for public services including student aid, are turning to the drug trade, where, competing with others so disenfranchised, they are engaged in a battle for survival that is inevitably violent? Is it possible that well-meaning reformers, focused on narrow aspects of the problem and dependent on the system, are perpetuating the greater injustice? After considering Alexander’s book and examining official criminal justice records, I am convinced the answer to all these questions is yes.

Back in the late 90s, I worked with a coalition then called the Alliance for the Restoration of Ex-Offenders, whose mission was to amend the Delaware Constitution to permit ex-felons to vote. Capping a battle that went back 20 years to the struggles of the late Representative Al O. Plant, we succeeded, although Delaware still requires a five-year wait following completion of sentences, including economic penalties and other restrictions. Another amendment, the Hazel D. Plant Voter Restoration Act, (HB 9), which will remove most restrictions, will reach its final leg in the 2013 General Assembly. While one of my motivations was the disparate impact felon disenfranchisement had on African Americans, I learned never to use the word “racist” in the State Legislature. I also learned that many ex-felons had other concerns than just the right to vote. They told me, in so many words, “It’s great, Phil, if we can get to vote, but we need jobs.”

The hurdles that ex-offenders face in getting a job, described by Michelle Alexander’s work, demonstrate the weakness of the piece-meal reforms we worked so hard for in the nineties. Barring 7.5 percent of its voters, Delaware is still second in the nation in disenfranchising its citizens, ahead of states with greater restrictions on felons voting, according to the ACLU. Arguably, there are more disenfranchised now than when we won our victory.  My experience then and reading The New Jim Crow now convinces me that it is time to call the War on Drugs and its attendant mass incarceration what it is, a racist criminal justice system, and to seek its abolition.

Alexander’s thesis is that in spite of today’s lack of overt racist sentiment and the appearance of African Americans in high positions, caste disenfranchisement that began with slavery has persisted in new forms throughout our history and exists today in our criminal justice system, due in large part to the War on Drugs. “Colorblindness” is more a blindness to the color line than its abolition.

She traces the seesaw battle between racial progress and mechanisms to maintain blacks as a “lower caste,” that is, “individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society.” Black and white bond workers worked shovel by plow together and even linked arms against plantations barons in Bacon’s Rebellion of 1675. Planters learned their lesson and began importing more slaves and offering special privileges to whites. Upon a “racial bribe” for poor whites and upon the interests of wealth, then, slavery, the original system of caste control, took root.

Following emancipation,  “black codes” like vagrancy laws were imposed to force blacks back on the plantation. Reconstruction, backed by federal troops, led to progress, but when the troops were withdrawn, Klan terror and “Jim Crow” laws imposed a new regime of caste control that lasted over 75 years.

In the modern era, the Civil Rights movement, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act did much to dismantle the system of racial caste, but the economic and cultural forces of Jim Crow did not die away, according to Alexander; they are reborn in mass incarceration. Once incarcerated, blacks enter a “hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social exclusion”:

Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man at the height of Jim Crow.

But “whoa,” the reader will protest. “If you do the crime, you do the time. Race has nothing to do with it. If 61 percent behind bars are blacks and Hispanics, so what if they’re only 29 percent of the population? Blacks and browns are committing the crimes.” 

Well-meaning reformers bolster the notion that crime is a black thing, according to Alexander, because, blinded by the colorblindness myth, they see the disparities in incarceration as due

to the predictable though unfortunate, consequences of poverty, racial segregation, unequal educational opportunities, and the presumed realities of the drug market, including the mistaken belief that most drug dealers are black or brown.

That drug crime is not a particularly black or brown phenomenon is Alexander’s most shocking revelation. The misconception began, she says, during the Reagan era. Right after Reagan declared the War on Drugs in 1982, crack cocaine began to spread across the country. She recalls that drug traffickers associated with Nicaraguan “Contras” were protected by the CIA, which, under Reagan, supported their war against the Sandinista Government. She rejects conspiracy theories that the CIA spread crack deliberately, but Reagan’s staff began to publicize the spread “to build public and legislative support for the war.” In short order, reports Alexander, “the media was saturated with images of black ‘crack whores,’ ‘crack dealers,’ and ‘crack babies’—images that seemed to confirm the worst negative racial stereotypes about impoverished inner-city residents.”

Soon, get-tough-on-crime laws proliferated. Since Ronald Reagan declared the War and Drugs in 1982, incarceration in the United States has soared from less than 500,000 to 2,266,832 at the end of 2010. No other country imprisons citizens at so high a rate. 

In spite of the overwhelmingly dark complexion of the prison population, blacks and whites actually use drugs at roughly the same rates, reveals Alexander, citing the 2000 and 2007 National Household Surveys on Drug Abuse.

Alexander ascribes the discrepancy between drug use and drug arrest to several factors, but especially the stop and frisk policies in black neighborhoods, federal incentives to local law enforcement, excessive plea bargaining, neglect by the Civil Rights community, and a number of federal court cases disallowing disparate impact as evidence of discrimination without explicitly expressed intent. If you can’t find some lawmaker saying he wants this law because it will keep the black man down, you don’t have a case. Wink-and-a-nod-racism empowers the New Jim Crow.

Do Delaware politicians, policy-makers, police, and statisticians similarly wink and nod?  Recall how I was told “Don’t use the word ‘racism’” when working on ex-felon voting rights in the Delaware General Assembly. Let’s look at a 2011 report requested by that august Assembly, submitted by the Criminal Justice Statistical Review Committee.

At the outset, the study seems to confront the issue directly. “Some observers,” they report, “suggest that racial profiling and selective targeting cause a disproportionate number of minority arrests.” To see if this is so, they compare percentages of blacks identified in complaints for robbery, assault, and rape to percentages of blacks who were consequently arrested, detained, convicted, and incarcerated. Blacks led significantly, if not dramatically, in almost every category but convictions, which whites, if arrested, were more likely to face. In the end, however, even if convicted, whites were less likely to face jail.  Based on this data, the Review Committee reassured the General Assembly that “racial disparities in the criminal justice system in Delaware are primarily explained by disparities in reported criminal activity rather than selective enforcement” They allow, however, that the study “shows a clear need to delve into these statistics to determine if there is racial bias or if the racial disparities reflect factors unrelated to the criminal justice system, or some combination of both.”

They should have delved.

Instead, they duck the issue of racial profiling in drug crimes. Because drug dealing “does not involve specific individual victims,” they explain, arrests are not generally responses to complaints, so “these arrests may be perceived to be police-initiated.” Nonetheless, they explain, such crimes “involve neighborhood quality of life complaints or investigations of other criminal activity, and the drug trade has long been associated with high levels of street violence.” Therefore, they conclude,  “[i]t is . . . problematic to regard drug dealing arrests as simply discretionary law enforcement choices.” There’s nothing to see here if 72.9 percent of those arrested for “drug dealing” are black (white percentages not reported). Once arrested, blacks are much more likely than whites to be detained (85.4 percent black vs. 68.3 percent white) and incarcerated if convicted (60.2 percent Black vs. 36.9 percent white). Recall that only slightly more than 20 percent of Delaware residents are black.

Whether or not police arrests are racially biased begs the question of whether blacks are committing drug crimes more than whites. Furthermore, the issue of violent crime is a red herring, but it is a fish that has been well baked by the much-vaunted Delaware Sentencing Accountability Commission (SENTAC).

In SENTAC’s study “2007 Superior Court Drug Case Sentencing Patterns,” researchers John P. O’Connel, Jr. and Spencer B. Price attempt to show how the Delaware Drug Court mitigates some of the concerns raised by Michele Alexander.

First, they address the hypothetical question “Isn’t it true that most offenders are sentenced to prison for non-violent offenses?” The answer, they assert, can be given “with some certainty when using the legal definition of violent crime found in 11§ 4201.” A quick search of the Delaware Code shows that many drug crimes, from “Manufacture of Controlled Substances” to “Aggravated Possession,” are defined as violent crimes. Thus, with some Orwellian circular reasoning, because Delaware says a drug crime is a violent crime, then only violent criminals are in prison.

Having excluding most drug offenders from the “non-violent” category, SENTAC then asks “[h]ow many non-violent drug offenders are sentenced to prison?” The answer: only 14 in 2007. Despite SENTAC’s assurances, of the 2075 convictions that were for drugs only (both the statutorily “violent” and the “non violent” kind), the vast majority served some time incarcerated and were permanently labeled “felon,” if they were not already so labeled, and permanently relegated to what Michelle Alexander calls the “lower caste.”

If you do the crime, you do the time . . . if you’re black.

This explosive charge by Michele Alexander applies in the First State.

Extrapolating from figures in Results from the 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health and US Census data for Delaware in 2010 for persons aged 12 and over, roughly 43,000 whites used illicit drugs in the past month, while a little over 16,000 blacks did. Put another way, over two and a half times as many whites as blacks used illicit drugs in any recent month. Yet, according to the report to the General Assembly cited above, 72.9 percent of adult males arrested for “drug dealing” were black.

By the way, those National Surveys on Drug Use are based on confidential and anonymous interviews and are well accepted for their reliability.

One can argue that we are comparing apples to oranges, one year’s convictions for drug dealing to another year’s use by persons over 12, or drug dealing to a host of drug offences that may or not be statutorily violent, so we cannot draw any conclusions. Perhaps that is the idea. None of the studies I have found focus acutely on the issue of racial disparity between drug crime and drug arrest. Much less do they deal with the complex networks of wink-and-a-nod racism.

What is to be done?

There are many good folks trying out solutions to the wave of violence in the cities, the disappearance of young black men into the criminal justice system, and drug abuse. Churches, non profits, activists, and mental health providers offer alternatives and advocate limited reforms. The News Journal has been promoting the Safe Communities approach, that lets concerned citizens confront gang members and offer alternatives to their ultimate incarceration. All of these are good, but almost every criminal justice reform, civil rights, peace, and social justice organization or non-profit intersects on some level with the state’s hierarchy of bankers, politicians, and chateau-country elites, who might be offended if we go off the plantation.

Nonetheless, all our efforts will fail unless they are grounded in a common set of values that says the War on Drugs must end and the prison system must be abolished.

Drugs are a social problem, not a criminal problem. Crimes associated with drugs are virtually all products of their prohibition and the lack of mental health services for those addicted.

Many families know the nightmare of addiction. They struggle against forces that tear them apart, and they struggle together to get their loved ones treatment, before they end up incarcerated, sick, homeless, or dead. Those with means go to Betty Ford’s. Those without, go to jail, come out stigmatized and disenfranchised, and fall into the quicksands of relapse, trafficking, and a violent struggle to survive.

The reduction in harms with drug legalization is known. In the ten years since Portugal in effect legalized all drugs, drug use has fallen across the board, HIV infections are down 17 percent, and drug deaths have fallen one half. Drug trade violence is forcing many countries to face the inevitable: The War on Drugs is a disaster. In the United States, it has spawned the New Jim Crow.

Next door in New Jersey, Republican Governor Chris Christie has declared, "The war on drugs, while well-intentioned, has been a failure." He adds, "Every life is precious and every one of God's creatures can be redeemed, but they won't if we ignore them."

Michele Alexander demands that blacks who have won social mobility in the “Age of Colorblindness,” as well as whites, give up the “racial bribe” that buys silence about what happens to “the least among us,” white, black, or brown. She quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. who told SCLC staff less than a year before his death, “it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights. . . . We must see the great distinction between a reform movement and a revolutionary movement. We are called up to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.”

It is no coincidence that accompanying the spread of this heartless mass incarceration since the 80s has been the rise of a heartless economic policy called neoliberalism (neo:new; liber: free). Free the class of plutocrats from any social contract, free the rich from taxes, free the employer from paying a living wage, free the banks and industries from regulation, cut loose the social safety net, and replace it with jail. Liberals, meaning liberal Democrats, no longer act free to challenge neoliberalism. While they have rightly challenged the Jim Crow aspects of new voter ID laws, they are shy about taking on the prison-industrial complex, looking weak on law and order, or taking on Jim Crow in the War on Drugs.

The economic collapse brought on by neoliberalism has drained accumulated wealth among blacks more than whites, who have also suffered mightily. Runaway industries offer few opportunities for whites to maintain their lifestyles or for a new generation of African Americans to rise to the middle class, in spite of affirmative action. The young black male, disenfranchised by the New Jim Crow, faces towering obstacles.

Movements like Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Delaware have awakened the nation and the state to the increasing imbalance in power and wealth between the richest one per cent and the ninety-nine per cent that is the rest of us. They are exposing the central contradiction of our time, something that is inspiring people across the globe to rise up in revolt. What they and all of us need to do is to recognize who is paying the greatest price for neoliberalism and put the overthrow of the New Jim Crow front and center.

For all who would march toward justice, read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and you’ll see farther down the road where our paths must meet. 

Merely a Table of Contents

Below is the Table of Contents for my completed book, Valdemar's Corpse, about Delaware's secret literary history. It is more than a mere survey. It is a 106,491 word story of Delaware's literary legacy:

1. Introduction: Delaware’s 20th Century Griswold

2. John Lofland: Delaware’s First Literary Pariah

3. Two Articles by John Lofland While Living and Working in Baltimore

4. Lofland the Progressive

5. The Milford Bard and the Mysterious Woman of his Final Romance

6. Two Tales from the Novels of Robert Montgomery Bird;

“Searching for the Body of Sheppard Lee,” and,

“The Confession of Ralph Stackpole, Horse Thief”

7. Delaware Author George Alfred Townsend’s Novels about Slavery & Murder

8. George Alfred Townsend: Between Twain and Able

9. New Castle Hi-jinx; Charles Heber Clark’s Out of the Hurly-Burly

and Ella Middleton Tybout’s Poketown People

10. Henry Seidel Canby & Christopher Ward:

Forerunners of Wilmington’s 20th Century Literary Movement

11. The Novels of John and Mary Biggs and Poe’s Karma

12. Nothing Ends in Life: Mary Biggs’ Lily-Iron

13. The Great Gatsby’s Delaware Connection:

A Review of Gatsby, GATH, and Gault by David W. Meredith

14. Bunny, The Judge and The Last Tycoon

15. Anne & Dillwyn Parrish, And The Roles of the Interloper

16. James Whaler, Wilmington’s Most Successful 20th Century Poet

17. Haunted by Home: The Life and Works of Charles Wertenbaker

18. Boojum’s Books: Green Peyton’s

Black Cabin and Rain on the Mountain, and Other Stories

19. First Crash: The Earliest Literary Works of G. Peyton Wertenbaker

20. Victor Thaddeus' Unpublished Comic Opera, ‘ORRIBLE 'ARRY and THE COURT TIGER, and lost novella, LEO REX

21. Children in the Maelstrom: Two Post War Novels by Anne Parrish

22. Where Evil is Stronger Than Love: The Wartime Novels of Two Delaware Authors

23. The Patron Saint of Baynard Boulevard: A Personal View of the Life and Times of Wilmington Poet David Hudson

24. The Legacy of Delaware’s Poets and the Post World War II Poetry Movement

25. The Hoax Nobody Noticed

Sound interesting? Curious? Even if you might be interested or curious, you may never have the opportunity to read it. Valdemar's Corpse has been rejected by the University of Delaware Press twice, Oak Knoll Press twice, as well as by Greywolf Press and Schiffler Publishing Ltd. Most of it has been serialized in The Broadkill Review but not in sequence, so the "story" doesn't emerge. I don't even know how widely read those chapters have been. I can no longer afford to self publish. What should I do? Should I send files of the manuscript, along with selected pictures, to people who might be interested? I don't know who'd be interested or curious. Should I keep trying to find a publisher? How long will that take? I've done all this work and I'm really tired and sinking deeper into poverty. I'm frustrated that what I consider to be valuable information is not being made available, especially for the sake of discovery by others who never knew there was such a thing as a Delaware' secret literary history. Or should I conclude that no one's interested in past Delaware literary artists and give in to the prevailing amnesia? Could that be some reflection about the prevailing interest in current Delaware literature? Or should I conclude I've deluded myself with my own conceit, wasted my time, and just delete the file?

Our e. jean lanyon: Still Indestructable

Our e. jean Lanyon, Delaware Poet Laureate from 1979 to 2001, Dreamstreets Magazine founder and illustrator, Pea Patch Island imager, and driving force behind the First State Writers for 50 years, will be featured in a timely retrospective of her art work April 6 through May 23 at the Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover, Delaware.

Mystic Tree, watercolor by E. Jean Lanyon

A true plein air artist, E. Jean Lanyon (so spelled when painting) has carted her easel and brushes for half a century into the glittering undergrowth of the Diamond State bioregion from Brandywine Springs Park to Pea Patch island and brought back a treasure trove of evocative canvases. The opening reception will take place from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. April 6. There will be a Gallery Talk by Curator Ryan Grover and e. jean will read her poetry at 6:30 p.m. The Biggs Museum is located at 406 Federal Street, Dover, Delaware 19903.

I just pulled down a sample of e. jean lanyon’s literary work from my bookshelf. On top is Woman Scrapbook, a blue 1979 chapbook filled with poems and collages from the life of the mother, widow, feminist, poet, and artist. “For Flip Bannowsky,” she wrote on the title page, “in sisterhood for a fellow poet.” The book is an artifact of the era of the ERA—the Equal Rights Amendment—which flashed in the pan of American politics until it was shouted down by the traditional values claque of the day.

Our e. jean was no flash in the pan, however, and she has persevered as a Delaware institution since she first published her work in the University of Delaware’s Grover back in 1955. She began as a practicing professional fine artist in 1958. In 1970, her first volume of poetry, The Myrno Bird came out. Her People Garden appeared in 1976. She has continued to publish, edit, mentor, teach, paint, speak, garner awards and honors, and organize readings through all the vicissitudes of her productive life.

Someone once said that there would be a poetry reading in Browntown when pigs fly. Browntown is a traditional working class Polish Community on Maryland Avenue where it runs into Wilmington. She and Peg Clifford took the challenge and organized a reading in the back room of Browntown’s Cedar Tavern for several years running. They called it, appropriately, Pigs Fly. That whimsical nature is visited in the occasional pocket-sized musings of one Nezzra O’Possum of lanyon’s Possum Garage Press, now up to #12. Nezzra laments the inhumanities, insanities, and insults of an insufferable world, but just can’t bring herself to buy into the self-righteous pessimism of the professional pity-me class. The annals of e. jean Lanyon appear in her annual newsletter, illustrated and printed in her own hand to recount her many juried exhibitions, life challenges, and victories.

Of course I am prejudiced. We have been friends ever since I interviewed her for an article in the September 1980 edition of The Delaware Alternative Press. It was called “Indestructible e. jean lanyon.” She was challenging the sexist employment practices at the University of Delaware, where she had worked as a draftsperson in the Facilities Planning Office for eight years. She was living penuriously and frugally, raising funds for her case by selling signed prints of her drawings.  Since then e. jean lanyon has been ubiquitous in Delaware’s artistic and literary scene. I have seen her at almost every Second Saturday reading since the Eschaton Writers, of which she was a founding member, inaugurated it over thirty years ago.

The art and poetry of e. jean lanyon is direct, accessible, honest, contemplative, and beautiful. Ever refusing to be obscure, she has portrayed her life and the natural environment of Delaware as something for everyone to experience. How she has led her life is an inspiration to every artist struggling to be seen and heard in a tiny state that can be insular and suffocating. But our e. jean remains indestructible.

HERE'S JOHN GALT!

To the right is the cover of the first paperback edition of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged that I read while still in high school in 1962. The print of my hand with my thumb pushing up through the word "Atlas" can still be seen. As a slow reader in high school, it took several months to read it, carrying it with me through all my classes. I savored every word and soon embraced the philosophy Rand espoused.

My father, who read this very same edition before me, said Rand's novel was an allegory, but I was overpowered by it. I even had the experience of asking Ayn Rand a question during a lecture she gave in late 1962 in Philadelphia. I couldn't help but to notice how many in the audience dressed to emulate the characters in her novels, how many women dressed to look like Dagny Taggart and how many of the men fancied themselves to look like Howard Roark. My question was a simple one about cinema. Many in the audience snickered openly at my question, but Rand gently admonished them and, having begun her career in cinema as a screenwriter and extra in Hollywood, and patiently answered my question and left a lasting impression. Later when I became a student of cinema I found her answer to my question valuable for my own assessment of the films I later viewed.

As I continued to live my life I attempted to embody Rand's philosophy to my own life, using it to address my personal problems and shortcomings. Over time I found Rand's philosophy in this manner an utter failure. Coupled with my father's comment that Atlas Shrugged was an allegory, the epiphany provided by my participation in the Vietnam War, the Counter Culture and reading Marx, Engels and Lenin revealed the central allegory of her novel.

Time and better understanding had caused her philosophy to fade from my mind, but I still relished the fact that Atlas Shrugged is a marvelously written work, which contributes to its power as a great piece of American literature that remains in print. However, the notion of allegory, of looking at Atlas Shrugged as a literary work, led me to discover a fatal flaw in Rand's use of it to promote a faulty philosophy.

In Atlas Shrugged is found the refrain, uttered during critical points in the narrative, "Who is John Galt?" We don't really meet John Galt in Rand's novel until near the end of the story. However, the reader learns little details about him throughout the earlier parts of the novel, the main one being that John Galt is an inventor who has invented a kind of perpetual motion machine.

In spite of the literary device of delaying the appearance of the novel's prime character, John Galt does make appearances throughout Atlas Shrugged. He is a worker for Dagny and her brother James's Railroad Company. Anonymously, Galt occasionally engages in coincidental conversations in the company's lunchroom with Eddie Willers, who is one of Dagny's underlings. Willers conveys the essence of these conversations to Dagny Taggard, who is conflicted as to whether she should join the strike of all men of mind—and presumably some women—who have brought the economy to its knees by disappearing or withdrawing from the world and hiding out in a secret location.

Hindsight had exposed the ultimate literary allegory, embedded in the very nature of the prime character of Atlas Shrugged, that of John Galt. It occurred to me that the only perpetual motion machine engaged in production of all sorts, the only thing that produces wealth itself is the working class. It would be fitting and appropriate for Rand to originally portray the "inventor" of the perpetual motion machine as an anonymous worker. Near the end of the novel, John Galt commandeers the world's broadcast system and imparts his—and Rand's—tome to the individual with all its allusions to human value and secular morality. It is the philosophy of "objectivism" in a nutshell. At the end of the novel, almost like a benediction, Galt traces the sign of the dollar in the air. We need to remember that the dollar is not wealth in and of itself, only the means of exchange, called "currency,” by which labor, which in the parlance of "labor power" is the commodity we exchange for the commodities we produce as that perpetual motion machine called the working class. By tracing that sign of the dollar in the air, Galt reaffirms the true exchange of wealth from those who produce it to those who use it, and from those who use it to those who produce it, a notion dangerously close to the axiom, "From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs."

One wonders if Ayn Rand had not been spinning her wheels in order to avoid her aversion to the a socialist model of human endeavors, which we as a species have not completely worked out in spite of all those stops and starts, setbacks and experiments and later perspectives. After all, one might argue that Rand, who as a girl, may have been traumatized at her young age from her family's escape from the travails of the Bolshevik Revolution. As time went on in the midst of an American capitalist orgy, her faith may have been bolstered in the notion of an ultimate efficacy of capitalism tempered by a kind of idealized libertarian anarchy. In the end we might come to the conclusion, in the case of Ayn Rand's considerable literary contribution, that the most durable and efficacious truths may be embedded less in her philosophy and more in her literature.

After 50 years, I still remember Ayn Rand’s answer to my question. She told me how some filmmakers use texture in their conveyance of image and subtle emphasis to certain details to reveal intent. She suggested that these devices could transform image into what is beautiful, and that by the end of the film help certain truths to emerge from the mind of the filmmaker. After 50 years since I plodded word for word through the texture and details in Atlas Shrugged, certain truths, perhaps unavoidably, have emerged from the fertile soil of experience and knowledge as well as from the literature, not the philosophy, of Ayn Rand.

Where Pennsylvania Pours into Delaware

Delaware’s border with Pennsylvania is unique because it is the only border between states that is an arc of a circle. When established by the famed Mason and Dixon, that border proved to be imprecise and had to undergo various minor adjustments over the centuries. Today, in that thicket of roads and neighborhoods that dot the region, the border between Delaware and Pennsylvania is largely invisible unless you can find those old marker stones, or by today’s standards, encounter the welcoming signs along the roads and highways between the states, or detect the subtle differences in road paving. However, it is a border that’s definite enough, for example, to place the esteemed American artist Andrew Wyeth as a Pennsylvania artist and not a Delaware artist even though he has some connections to Delaware. These are the kinds of connections that pour down the Brandywine River from its sources in Pennsylvania to its terminus in Wilmington, Delaware.

A story of this small but significant river is the subject of Delaware author Henry Seidel Canby’s The Brandywine, originally published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1941, and more recently by Schiffer Publishing Ltd. It is a nice complement to Canby’s earlier book about Wilmington, The Age of Confidence, which was the subject of an earlier post.

Initially, Canby’s The Brandywine was part of the series “The Rivers of America,” edited by Stephen Vincent Benét and Carl Carmer. In the book Canby reiterates the early Dutch and Swedish history of Wilmington in the context of the Brandywine, when it was a little explored river that the local Lenapi called the Wawaset. It was not until the English, led largely by William Penn and the Quakers who more extensively explored the river, realized its potential as an energy source for milling and manufacture and drove out the indigenous Lenapi, the latter being more extensively covered by Delaware historian Clinton Weslager’s book Red Men on the Brandywine (Hambleton, 1953).

However, the early Swedes contributed an item that was first introduced in early Wilmington, in the settlement they called New Sweden, which was the log cabin and which later became an American icon. Another American icon first introduced in Wilmington, when it had been developed by the English into a town filled with mills designed to convert grain into flour, was the vehicle used for transporting grain and flour to and from the various mills along the lower Brandywine. The icon, known as the Conestoga wagon, was later referred to as the “prairie schooner,” which helped to drive American expansionism westward. The confluence of the Brandywine with Wilmington in those early days that spanned Delaware as a British colony and as the first of our United States resulted in other firsts, like the earliest use of steam power for manufacture in the country. During the final years of the British colony, during the American Revolution, and in the earliest years of the republic, Wilmington’s relationship to the Brandywine led the region to become among the more important centers for manufacture, milling and transportation in the thirteen new and independent states.

Canby, in The Brandywine, covers all aspects of the river’s history from a recounting of the confused gallantry of the Battle of the Brandywine during the American Revolution, fraught with its treachery by secret loyalists, poor intelligence gathering, and Quaker equivocation under the guise of pacifism. He covers the rise of early duPont manufacturing, which coincided with an influx of French into Wilmington giving the name to Wilmington’s French Street. The French influence also provided Wilmington a sophisticated cosmopolitan flavor, which against the backdrop of Quaker austerity, made Wilmington culturally unique for a time in comparison to other nearby cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Henry Seidel Canby, being among the foremost literary critics of his day, addresses the literature of the Brandywine, during which he recognizes Poe as one who was certainly acquainted with the Brandywine, especially with regard to his relationship to John Lofland, who wrote stories that took place along the river’s shores. Canby does not take too seriously Lofland’s stories, Ono-keo-co, or the Bandit of the Brandywine and Manitoo, the Indian Beauty of the Brandywine, and Wild Harry of Wilmington. He considers both as “claptrap” designed for popular consumption though retaining reality of background. In higher regard, as candidates for serious Brandywine literature, are works by George Lippard, who was born at Chester Springs, and Bayard Taylor, who was born near Kennett Square and whose works appeared after those of Lofland and Lippard. Lippard’s novel, Blanche of the Brandywine; or September the Eleventh 1777, published in 1846, is almost impossible to find. Taylor’s novel The Story of Kennett was first published by Putnam in 1866 and again by the same publisher in 1903 accompanied by photographs from the region. Canby also speculates that the woodland in the Brandywine valley may have been the inspiration for Howard Pyle’s novel The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.

Today, thanks in great part to the preservation efforts of the Bancrofts, whose contribution Canby also acknowledges, the Brandywine’s natural beauty is still with us to enjoy, as well as all those gentle ghosts, conjured by Lofland, Lippard and Taylor, and others, who still haunt it through the pages of their surviving literature.

A City of Ghosts

Several months ago the publisher of a local online literary magazine asked if I might consider producing a site map of places of literary interest. Initially I thought this might be a good idea. Because I had been developing a keen curiosity about the legacy of Wilmington’s history of jazz, and because I felt that literature and jazz seem to go well together because, at least, their histories were contemporary, I considered doing a site map that contained both.

I began by listing locations, first the homes where different authors, poets, and musicians had lived. Then I listed other locations like schools, clubs and other places of business like bookstores. After listing about a couple dozen sites, it dawned on me how unviable a site map of this type would be.

Site maps are made for tourists or interested persons as a tool, but I found there would be little or nothing to actually see. The home of jazz great Clifford Brown is still a vacant lot. The home of Alice Dunbar-Nelson had been replaced with an office building. I-95 runs through the block where the Wertenbakers had grown up. Ellerslie, where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had lived, had been torn down decades ago. A plaque installed on the former home of James Whaler, Wilmington’s most successful 20th century poet, had been removed by the owner. The Wilmington location of Friends’ School, where nearly all successful early 20th century Wilmington authors had at attended least in part, had decades ago moved to an affluent suburb, leaving its former Wilmington location still a largely vacant lot. Many famous clubs, like the Club Baby Grand and The Spot, that made Wilmington’s jazz history so notable, have become the victims of “urban renewal.” The very street on which Daisy Winchester had her speakeasy doesn’t even exist anymore. For those few places that Wilmington’s literati frequented, the most well known –– if indeed “well known” is even applicable –– was the Greenwood Book Store, but I challenge anyone to tell me where it had been located.

In 1934 Wilmington author Henry Seidel Canby published The Age of Confidence (Farrar & Rinehart). In it Canby examines life in Wilmington during the turn of the 20th century. Locally, one can tell by his name he’s a part of a large and old family in Wilmington. Canby should know. In the book he gives thorough perspective on subjects still relevant today: family life, lifestyle, religion and literature and pop culture. Yet there’s a bigger story. It’s the story of a city at a turning point in history. It is a comment on the Progressive Era because he examines the age before it. It was an age of laissez faire, those values and sentiment still imbibing those flavors from old southern chivalry, steeped in the works of Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, and Ulysses Grant’s Memoirs. There’s little of Whitman and Poe if anything at all. Certainly there was a boho somewhere lurking in some cultural crevice of Wilmington reading Poe and Whitman, but for the majority who had ushered in the 20th century it was an “age of confidence.”

Canby wrote The Age of Confidence at a time after The Progressive Age had fallen into the pit of The Great War, and after the tawdry age of The Roaring 20s. The Great Depression was obstructing the careers of many emerging literati who first flourished thanks to the cultural boost provided by the Progressive Era.

At the onset of The Great Depression many Wilmington literati moved to New York City to continue their careers, surviving with pop novels and journalism. Canby never forgot his roots even though he was one who went to New York and found success. He founded The Saturday Review of Literature, which could be found on most newsstands. He wrote books about Thoreau and Whitman and was considered among the most preeminent of reviewers and cultural commentators toward the middle of the 20th century, and he was the father of Wilmington’s literati. His house is now someone’s personal property, unless its been turned into an apartment house, in which case it’s someone’s private property. The house belonging to Christopher Ward is nearby, but Ward did not leave Wilmington. He remained to write histories in retirement. Ward’s fiction was beginning to wither into the throes of the Depression. Wilmington poet James Whaler went away and became a professor, which is a profession that occupied Canby for many years. Even Canby’s wife, who is loosely portrayed in Canby’s only novel, Our House (1919, MacMillan) was a successful poet, having her work published in Scribner’s, The New Yorker, and The Saturday Review of Literature. Marion Canby’s poetry is collected in High Mowing (1932 Houghton Mifflin).

In Wilmington we had, at one time in the 1920s, more than a half dozen successful novelists living in or near Wilmington, including F. Scott Fitzgerald. All but Fitzgerald are now ghosts gathering dust on those library shelves where their work might be found.

The Progressive Era ended with the World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, but two aspects of its legacy continued in the 1920s. The first, which didn’t work, was Prohibition, and which helped launched the “Lost Generation.” The other was Women’s Suffrage, which did work. By the time Canby wrote The Age of Confidence, Delaware Avenue in Wilmington, where he and Christopher Ward had lived, was a ghost of its former self. While others of Wilmington’s literati ––Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Charles and Peyton Wertenbaker, Anne Parrish and James Whaler –– left town, Canby’s book was no more than a reminder of a city that once was, and was filling up with ghosts.

As the 1930s developed, however, the power of the music being made on Wilmington’s eastside ushered in a new cultural era. Jazz was being heard and played and attracting the attention of the jazz world. Great jazz artists from Wilmington like Betty Roché, Clifford Brown and Lem Winchester would be propelled into the “big time.” This time it was not The Great Depression that ended an era, but some racist and faulty idea called “urban renewal.” The wholesale destruction of an entire section of
Wilmington nearly destroyed our city’s jazz community.

Here are the ghosts I still see in Wilmington, when I see someone carrying a case for a musical instrument, or a familiar figure standing on a doorstep in a building no longer there, or in a plate glass window where once a jazz club or bookstore or gallery once stood. This vision of ghosts is superimposed upon all the amnesia inflicted by those politicians and developers who think as little about how the changes they’re making of our city today will affect us all tomorrow as they think little about how the contribution from the past still haunts Wilmington. Then again, maybe I’m the only one who is haunted, but I’d rather be haunted than drowning in a sea of ignorance and amnesia.

Occupy Wall Street: the Space in the Spandrels

We hear quite a bit about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon in terms of a space: “opening a space for a conversation about the economy,” for example.

Everyone who has been trying to raise the alarm in the space of rational argument about the wholesale transfer of wealth and power upward in America for the last thirty years has failed to be heard. And now some hippies show up in a park beating on drums and everyone is talking about economic justice. How did they do that?

Many are puzzled about this term space. Spacey is how some have stereotyped the partisans of this movement. Maybe a way to understand this space is in terms of a spandrel.

A spandrel is an architectural term. An architect constructs a building with a combination of straight lines and curves, which don’t really mix that well, so he or she ends up with leftover space. What spans the space between, say, the curve of an arch and the square that boxes it in is a spandrel. It wasn’t exactly planned; it’s just an unavoidable feature of the structure. (Spandrels also exist in evolutionary biology: features that arise as side effects of adaptive processes and are accidentally useful in sustaining life, a thought that may pertain to my theme).*

photo by Einar Einarsson Kvaran aka Carptrash 19:35, 23 October 2006 (UTC) These spandrel figures representing Astronomy (left) and Sculpture (right) were created by Bela Pratt for the Library of Congress Building around 1896.

Society, too, has a structure. It is constructed not of pillars, lintels, and arches but of culture, politics, the economy, and just about anything that relates people to one another. Some voices among the Occupiers suggest that those of us who have challenged the elite in the past are even part of this structure.

And that makes us defensive. After all, we’ve organized, struggled, and even thrown our bodies under the machine. We got the tread marks to prove it. But maybe it’s true that we are part of the structure, at least in the sense that society bears the marks of treading over us, too.

The structure we live in has been imprinted with adaptations that thwart whatever we do to oppose it, be it educating, organizing, writing poetry, or, for that matter, waging armed insurrection. A well-cited example is how the “commons,” those spaces where citizens could pass out flyers, rally, or put up a picket line, have shrunk as shopping malls have privatized the spaces between shops. But it is not merely the physical space that is disappearing. Just ten years ago tens of millions of folks rallied in the commons against the impending invasion of Iraq to no avail. All the political structures that might previously have been compelled to respond to protests on this scale had adapted, with the obvious help of corporate treasure, so they felt no need to respond. It was as if the space where those multitudes marched had been rendered space no more.

Somehow these Occupiers have found the spandrels.

This is important to me as a poet, because I have been thinking for some time that arguing has not been able break the spell that fear and powerlessness has on our society. I have been thinking that only poetry could counter this spell, working in the space of the heart rather than the brain. I may have found this space in the spandrels.

What happens in these spandrels?

Well, for one thing, people give testimony about what the economic collapse has meant to them and their families. It’s about a middle class Puerto Rican family living the American Dream, father a physician, daughters with degrees and 100,000-dollar debts, losing the home they had lived in for forty years when pop is fired. It’s about a single mother of two offered a four-dollar-per hour job. About an autoworker with twelve-years seniority whose plant has just been raised to the ground. Black, brown, white, and up to now, unheard. You can see some of this testimony in Dana Garrett’s video of the October 15 Occupy Delaware rally in Rodney Square.

For another thing, there is a democratic process with no leaders. Rallies are called General Assemblies. You’re lucky if there is a PA system. Sometimes they use a “human megaphone,” whereby a speaker utters information or speeches in three- to five-word segments that are then repeated by the crowd nearby. Totally ad hoc conveners follow a simple process of proposals, clarifications, concerns, amendments, straw polls, and votes. We old radicals, trade unionists, and peaceniks stand aside as this newer world’s in birth.

It has a kind of poetry of its own, scribbled in the spandrels of the system. There is a kind of faith that ninety-nine percent of the people really can and do count.

So what is the role of the poet in this? Occupy Delaware has an Arts, Culture & Education Committee. In its Face Book discussion group the committee mentions education about the banking crisis and injustices by corporations and the use of art to engage supporters and to educate people about Occupy Delaware.

Now, programmatic poetry is problematic to poets of the highly crafted poem, poetry composed and read in contemplation, poetry like that of Dylan Thomas, which I love. Perhaps the distinction between programmatic and contemplative poetry is the same as that posed by the late revolutionary poet, Tom McGrath regarding Tactical and Strategic Poetry. Tactical Poetry is tied to “some immediate thing” like a “strike.” Strategic poetry, on the other hand, is “a poetry in which the writer trusts himself enough to write about whatever comes along, with the assumption that what he is doing will be, in the long run, useful, consciousness raising or enriching.” To me, that means writers of tactical poems will be writing under a deadline, bringing whatever poetic gifts they have to the immediate task, trusting that an accessible message gains profundity in its timeliness, and, as McGrath warns, facing the fact that eventually “the events they were about have moved out from under them.” Sic transit gloria.

My own attempt at a tactical poem, “Global Solidarity” can be read here or heard at about 5:26 in Dana Garrett’s video, above. Almost immediately after is a stirring poem called “Freedom Fighter,” by Red Lip Poetry Salon’s Amy Eyre.

In the architecture of manipulation, exploitation, and violence, there are spandrels, the left over spaces. There find the poet’s workshop and stage.

*See David M Buss et al., “Adaptations, Exaptations, and Spandrels,” American Psychologist 53:5, 1998, pp. 533-48, cited in Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, p. 227.