Radical literature -- Alan Wald and Al Maund -- and Charles Humboldt and Mainstream

["Hunter Gray" <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I very much appreciate Bill Mandel's thoughts on Tamiment Library and
radical literature -- and those by Sam Friedman and Andy Pyle.  Although
I've never met Alan Wald, I've read a number of his things and have a high
regard for the great commitment and quality of his work. This is certainly
shared by Left literary friends of mine. I've carefully looked over his
recently out Exiles from a Future Time, which is the focus of his upcoming
Tamiment reception -- the announcement of which I was, of course, very
pleased to post on a number of lists to which I have access.

In addition to our Redbadbear and Marxist lists in which this discussion has
been perking a bit, I'm posting this on Louis' Marxism Discussion as well.

Wald was key in the 1999 reissuance of a great radical Southern novel on
race and racism:  The Big Boxcar by Al Maund.  Al, a very courageous white
Southerner, also wrote for The American Socialist in the '50s, was editor
during that time of Labor's Daily, and later worked  for the International
Chemical Workers Union.  Another novel of his, The International [McGraw
Hill, 1961], is a fascinating study [based on the ICWU] of an American labor
union from the perspective of one of its key organizers and leaders.[This
was one of the texts I used at Tougaloo College in my very popular Labor
course.]  Al was, too, the long-time editor of  the Southern Patriot,
published by the Left civil rights organization, Southern Conference
Educational Fund [for which I was later Field Organizer under Jim
Dombrowski -- an old and close friend of Al's.].  Al and I had contact by
mail in the '50s and I knew him directly later in the '60s -- and we still
have pieces of furniture which he and his wife gave us.

I do have a couple of quibbles with the good Alan Wald.

Although in the latter 'eighties, Alan Wald elicited material from me and
from other Native writers, I've seen virtually no mention of the Native
dimension in any of his works thus far.  [If he doesn't do something on
that, well I will!  I say that with a friendly smile, but a very purposeful
one. I may do something anyway.]

And I was surprised and disappointed to see virtually no mention in Exiles
of the courageous trail blazed and the course pursued by Mainstream --
ostensibly a CPUSA publication, but one led very effectively and
courageously by the late Charles Humboldt, a very ecumenical Communist
indeed!  Under his capable direction, and via the vigorous and creative
assistance of close colleagues of his such as Dr Annette Rubinstein  who was
recently at Tamiment for the opening of her extraordinarily rich collection
of papers, Mainstream published a continual flow of really excellent radical
literary stuff: fiction, poetry, essays -- and fine art.

 Charles was eventually -- Summer 1960 --  cruelly hatcheted out of his
position by a faction of Party hacks identified with the antediluvian Bill
Foster. [But not before Charles and I had some very productive mutual
interaction]  After that, Mainstream plunged downhill and quickly died. And,
tragically, so did Charles -- who was then devoting his great gifts to the
National Guardian.

Here is material on Mainstream from my website.  The full page, which also
discusses radical editors Bert Cochran [The American Socialist] and Fred
Thompson [Industrial Worker] is at http://www.hunterbear.org/destroyers.htm

>From our large website:
UPDATE!  My prize winning short story -- "The Destroyers" -- has now for the
very first time appeared on the Net via this website.  It is on the page
immediately following this one which has the detailed background material
regarding its publication in Mainstream and elsewhere.  Link to the story is
http://www.hunterbear.org/the%20short%20story.htm



As long as I can remember, I've been writing things -- mostly agitational
stuff focused directly on issues and radical organizing. [ I started doing
"man's work" -- hard labor stuff -- as soon as I entered my 'teens and my
writing has always reflected this in one way or another.] While most of this
writing  has been articles, essays, editorials, leaflets and related
weapons -- and a big book, Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of
Struggle and Schism (1979 and 1987) --  there've been a few short stories.
One, "Last of the Wild Ones" -- based on my trapping experiences in the
super-rugged canyon country of Northern Arizona, was published as the lead
fictional piece [November 1957] in the huge circulation "man's magazine,"
Argosy.

But another story of mine, "The Destroyers," published initially in
Mainstream in 1960, won ever-broadening national and international renown.
It was  reprinted abroad in a variety of journals -- including those of the
Russian and the Ukranian writers' unions. And it was also picked by Martha
Foley and David Burnett as one of the very best short stories published in
the United States in 1960 and included in their very special  "Roll of
Honor" [about fifty stories]:   Martha Foley and David Burnett, The Best
American Short Stories, 1961 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story
[Boston:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961.]

"The Destroyers" involved virulent racist prejudice and violence in the
context of an extremely extensive and intensive Southwestern forest fire.

North Country -- an excellent annual literary magazine published at  the
University of North Dakota -- had, among its editors in 1988, one of my
sons, John, then completing his M.A. in English.  In addition to a fine
story by him and very good work by others, that edition included "The
Destroyers."

The following -- in quotes -- is introductory material which I provided for
that issuance of my story:

"  "The Destroyers" came directly out of a situation which I can still see
as vividly as if it occurred last summer -- not June, 1950.  At that long
ago point, I fought my first forest fire -- the A-1 Mountain Burn -- with
axe and shovel, just west of Flagstaff, Arizona.  As that inferno wound
down, another exploded on the slopes of the San Francisco Mountains, north
of Flagstaff and only a few miles from Highway 89 which carries one up
through the western Navajo country and into Mormon Utah.  On that fire, I
was put to work in camp where all the basic events depicted in "The
Destroyers" transpired  -- short of the final, lethal conclusion.  And that
tragedy came hideously close to reality.

Years later, I wrote the story; and submitted it to Harper's Magazine in
October, 1959, eventually receiving the longest letter of rejection I'd ever
gotten:  a full-page from its chief editor, vigorously commending "The
Destroyers," but  indicating "sadly"   that "it isn't the Harper's kind of
story."  [Within a few months, the civil rights sit-ins were to occur in the
upper South.]  I next sent it to Mainstream, a small, financially-broke and
perennially witch-hunted left-wing literary magazine, based in New York
[descendant of the old and New Masses]  whose always gracious and gently
sharp editor, Charles Humboldt, snapped it up immediately.  His persuasive
powers also commissioned me to do an extensive article on the on-going
Western copper strike, and its chief leader -- International Union of Mine,
Mill and Smelter Workers [Mine-Mill] -- with which I was closely identified.

"The Destroyers" appeared in May, 1960 [and the Mine-Mill article the
following October], all of this, it turned out, faithfully recorded by the
FBI which had, even by 1960, built a large file on me.  And the FBI
certainly pounced on the fact that the Russian Writers Union translated and
reprinted my story in  its journal in 1961.  I'm not sure if J. Edgar Hoover
and his bird-dogs were ever aware that "The Destroyers"  [in Mainstream] was
picked as one of the 50 best American short stories of the year by Martha
Foley in her 1961 Yearbook of the American Short Story.  Anyway, the two
dozen sheets relating to Mainstream contained in the  3,000 or so pages  of
my FBI file -- secured under the Freedom of Information Act -- carry no
mention of that honor.  By that time, I was off to do battle with the
destroyers in blood-dimmed Mississippi and far beyond."

I should add that, in addition to the 3,000 or so pages that I have in my
possession,  my total FBI file contains several hundred pages that the FBI
refuses to give me on various "security" grounds.

In 1998, the files of the old Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission --
the state secret police agency -- were finally opened.   And in 1999, I
received many hundreds of  Sovereignty Commission pages relating to me.
Among them were numerous   documents concerning Mainstream and much evidence
that at least two other agencies -- in addition to the FBI and the
Commission -- had been quite interested in my Mainstream ties:  the U.S.
Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and the Louisiana State Un-American
Activities Committee.

Charles Humboldt (1910-1964) was an excellent editor in every respect and a
damn fine human being.  During his tenure as Editor of Mainstream [ service
which, very regrettably, ended abruptly in late 1960], this top-flight
radical literary journal  consistently  secured very high calibre work and
courageously pursued a vigorous and  ecumenically Left focus.

Humboldt was a member of the Communist Party USA and his broadly Left
focus -- with a heavy emphasis on  genuinely excellent social justice
creativity -- drew to Mainstream a number of splendid radical writers and
poets and artists. Many of these were of the non-Communist Left.
Interestingly, it was Fred Thompson, veteran IWW editor and key mentor of
mine, who initially brought Mainstream to my attention.  No Communist in the
remotest sense, Fred nonetheless recognized and respected what Charles
Humboldt was attempting -- and suggested that I, at some point, might want
to submit some of my radical fiction to the journal.

And despite the still continuing Red Scare, Mainstream blossomed and
bloomed.  But grim clouds and heavy storms were brewing fast from another
direction.

Mainstream's developing success -- in the context of an ecumenically Left
approach and high grade writing -- antagonized the more narrow, rigid
elements in the CPUSA.  These were grouped around the titular leadership of
William Z. Foster.

Skirmishes became increasingly embittered conflicts.  Charles Humboldt
finally resigned from Mainstream in the Summer of '60 -- going on to write
for the radical National Guardian newspaper. Following his departure, a
number of us never wrote again for Mainstream and several of the journal's
Contributing Editors resigned -- including his close friend and colleague,
Dr Annette Rubinstein, a major force in Mainstream's creatively productive
life.  Mainstream then declined rapidly into a stale, colorless and just
plain dull caricature -- and formally died in 1963.  And Charles died a year
later.

In addition to Humboldt, the editorial circle included Phillip Bonosky as
Associate Editor  -- and  as Contributing Editors:  Herbert Aptheker, Jack
Beeching, Jesus Colon, Sidney Finkelstein, Hugo Gellert, Barbara Giles,
Shirley Graham, Milton Howard, John Howard Lawson, Meridel LeSueur, Walter
Lowenfels, Annette T. Rubinstein, and Philip Stevenson.

Dr. Annette Rubinstein, now in her early 'nineties -- and still teaching --
and I have been in contact in this newest century. In the Spring of 1960,
she came to Phoenix for a civil liberties speaking engagement and I, a
finishing grad student at Arizona State University and very much a fiery
young radical activist, had the fine fortune of driving and guiding this
excellent writer and courageous human being around the capital city of our
very challenging [and, to her, extremely mysterious and perhaps
understandably frightening]  state.  She seemed reassured by the fact that I
was [and am] a very big, husky thug!

On April 10, 2002, a celebration of Dr. Rubinstein's life and work was held
at Tamiment Library under the aupices of the  Library, New York University,
and The Brecht Forum. The special occasion was the opening of the very
extensive and extremely rich collection of her papers. From Idaho, I posted
the notice of this signal affair very widely indeed:

"Dr Rubinstein, in her very early nineties, is an extraordinarily creative
and courageous scholar activist. Her papers -- and her rich insights,
historical and contemporary -- will be of much value to anyone seriously
interested in the American radical movement and that of the world."  H

And here's another fascinating Mainstream postscript:  From the time [1997]
we arrived back in the Mountain West [Idaho], following our substantial
sojourn in the Northern Plains of North Dakota, we have been subjected to
obvious surveillance and related thrusts by so-called "lawmen" -- and have
been targets of racist harassment as well.  It's been increasingly clear
that a Federal/state/local lawmen "task force" has been conducting continual
surveillance of us, tampering with our telephones, and interfering with our
postal mail delivery.  See this link on our Lair of Hunterbear website which
leads to a very detailed and updated discussion of our now five years of
bizarre experiences:
http://www.hunterbear.org/hostility_and_harassment_in_idah.htm

Early on, it was clear there were weird things occurring with our mail.  In
1998, aware that I had no physically good copies of the Mainstream issues
containing my work [The Destroyers, May '60 -- and the long Mine-Mill
article, October '60], my oldest son, John, himself a top-flight writer --
and then an assistant U.S. Postmaster at Glyndon, Minnesota -- conducted a
quiet computer search for those issues of the journal.  Although copies of
Mainstream are rare indeed, he found the issues.  And, on January 5, 1999,
he mailed them to me from "his" post office at Glyndon, doing so by Priority
Mail.  As soon as they were mailed, he telephoned me and indicated they
should be -- if all went conventionally -- in my hands within three days.

They took ten full days to reach me.  In the middle of that, I questioned
our mail delivery man whose responses were evasive.  When the two copies of
Mainstream finally arrived, in their secure and properly addressed and fully
stamped Priority Mail package, holes had been poked into one corner of the
container -- but had missed the journals.  The prolonged postal odyssey of
those two issues of Mainstream, with my long ago work therein, served as the
basis for the first of several formal letters of complaint to U.S. Postal
Inspection authorities.  While those dubious worthies have never responded,
this was the beginning of our very formal and very open and increasingly
well-publicized  counter-attack -- which  has helped bring the existence of
these shadowy and covert Federal/state/local creatures-of-repression into
the public eye.

Charles Humboldt's Mainstream fights on!  And so do we.

-----------------------------------------------

That concludes that portion of my website page from which I've just quoted.
Now, I'm off to spend a couple of hours trying to spot an impressive
mountain lion -- whose huge, fresh tracks I spotted yesterday on a very
remote trail.  He -- it's obviously an extremely large male -- had walked on
my size 15 boot tracks of the previous day.  We have a special relationship
with the Bobcat as well as the Bear -- and a mountain lion comes in as very
close kin indeed.



Fraternally -- and also Nialetch

Hunter Gray  [Hunterbear] [formerly John R Salter, Jr]
www.hunterbear.org
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'




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