COMMUNIST PARTY TURNS OVER ARCHIVES TO NY UNIVERSITY
PATRICIA COHEN, NY TIMES - The songwriter, labor organizer and folk hero
Joe Hill has been the subject of poems, songs, an opera, books and
movies. His will, written in verse the night before a Utah firing squad
executed him in 1915 and later put to music, became part of the labor
movement's soundtrack. Now the original copy of that penciled will is
among the unexpected historical gems unearthed from a vast collection of
papers and photographs never before seen publicly that the Communist
Party USA has donated to New York University.
The cache contains decades of party history including founding
documents, secret code words, stacks of personal letters, smuggled
directives from Moscow, Lenin buttons, photographs and stern commands
about how good party members should behave (no charity work, for
instance, to distract them from their revolutionary duties).
By offering such an inside view, the archives have the potential to
revise assumptions on both the left and the right about one of the most
contentious subjects in American history, in addition to filling out the
story of progressive politics, the labor movement and the civil rights
struggles.
"It is one of the most exciting collecting opportunities that has ever
presented itself here," said Michael Nash, the director of New York
University's Tamiment Library, which will announce the donation on
Friday.
Liberal and conservative historians, told by The New York Times about
the archives, were enthusiastic about the addition of so many original
documents to the historical record. No one yet knows whether they can
resolve the die-hard disputes about the extent of the links between
American subversives and Moscow since, as Mr. Nash said, "it will take
us years to catalog." But what is most exciting, said Mr. Nash and other
scholars, is the new areas it opens up for research beyond the homegrown
threat to security during the cold war. . .
Every box offers up a different morsel of history. One contains a 1940
newsletter from students at City College in New York criticizing Britain
for betraying the Jews in Palestine; another has a 1964 flyer from the
Metropolitan Council on Housing urging rent strikes "to oppose the
decontrol of over-$250 apartments." There are the handwritten lyrics to
Pete Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn!"; a letter from W. E. B Du Bois in 1939
denying he took money from Japan for propagandizing on its behalf; and
detailed complaints of police brutality against African-Americans. . .
The party started out as an underground revolutionary organization but
achieved its greatest successes and popularity in the late 1930s as part
of the Popular Front, which it joined at Moscow's direction, said
Maurice Isserman, a historian at Hamilton College who has written
several books on American communism. At the same time, he said, some
Communist Party members were recruited into an espionage network, which
expanded tremendously during World War II, and ultimately infiltrated
the team working on the atomic bomb.
Despite its devotion to the Soviet line, the party was still influential
in left-wing and labor circles into the first few years of the cold war
era. But in 1948 it suffered a triple whammy: the Progressives expelled
the Communists; the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, which was backed
by the Soviets, soured many of its members; and the Red Scare ravaged
its ranks. Revelations about Stalin's crimes in 1956 disillusioned many
of those who remained and dealt the party a near-fatal blow. . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/arts/20nyu.html?ei=5090&en=
01273cdb17bb63b6&ex=1332043200&partner=rssuserland&emc=
rss&pagewanted=print
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OBAMA DIDN'T INVENT THE INTERNET; IN FACT, HE DOESN’T UNDERSTAND IT ALL
THAT WELL
TIME MAGAZINE - Barack Obama's reputation as a smart, savvy guy has to
come under fire for this laugher on Larry King last night about the
Hillary 1984 ad running on You Tube: "But it's not something that we had
anything to do with or were aware of and that frankly, given what it
looks like, we don't have the technical capacity to create something
like that. It's pretty extraordinary." The Obama campaign doesn't have
the "technical capacity" to dub an old commercial and superimpose
Hillary's face on a screen and their logo on a woman's t-shirt? What do
they have, five hamsters on wheels powering the campaign?
http://time-blog.com/real_clear_politics/2007/03/obamas_technical_
capacity.html?xid=rss-rcp
MORE POLITICAL NEWS
http://prorev.com/politics.htm
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PATRICIA COHEN, NY TIMES - The songwriter, labor organizer and folk hero
Joe Hill has been the subject of poems, songs, an opera, books and
movies. His will, written in verse the night before a Utah firing squad
executed him in 1915 and later put to music, became part of the labor
movement's soundtrack. Now the original copy of that penciled will is
among the unexpected historical gems unearthed from a vast collection of
papers and photographs never before seen publicly that the Communist
Party USA has donated to New York University.
The cache contains decades of party history including founding
documents, secret code words, stacks of personal letters, smuggled
directives from Moscow, Lenin buttons, photographs and stern commands
about how good party members should behave (no charity work, for
instance, to distract them from their revolutionary duties).
By offering such an inside view, the archives have the potential to
revise assumptions on both the left and the right about one of the most
contentious subjects in American history, in addition to filling out the
story of progressive politics, the labor movement and the civil rights
struggles.
"It is one of the most exciting collecting opportunities that has ever
presented itself here," said Michael Nash, the director of New York
University's Tamiment Library, which will announce the donation on
Friday.
Liberal and conservative historians, told by The New York Times about
the archives, were enthusiastic about the addition of so many original
documents to the historical record. No one yet knows whether they can
resolve the die-hard disputes about the extent of the links between
American subversives and Moscow since, as Mr. Nash said, "it will take
us years to catalog." But what is most exciting, said Mr. Nash and other
scholars, is the new areas it opens up for research beyond the homegrown
threat to security during the cold war. . .
Every box offers up a different morsel of history. One contains a 1940
newsletter from students at City College in New York criticizing Britain
for betraying the Jews in Palestine; another has a 1964 flyer from the
Metropolitan Council on Housing urging rent strikes "to oppose the
decontrol of over-$250 apartments." There are the handwritten lyrics to
Pete Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn!"; a letter from W. E. B Du Bois in 1939
denying he took money from Japan for propagandizing on its behalf; and
detailed complaints of police brutality against African-Americans. . .
The party started out as an underground revolutionary organization but
achieved its greatest successes and popularity in the late 1930s as part
of the Popular Front, which it joined at Moscow's direction, said
Maurice Isserman, a historian at Hamilton College who has written
several books on American communism. At the same time, he said, some
Communist Party members were recruited into an espionage network, which
expanded tremendously during World War II, and ultimately infiltrated
the team working on the atomic bomb.
Despite its devotion to the Soviet line, the party was still influential
in left-wing and labor circles into the first few years of the cold war
era. But in 1948 it suffered a triple whammy: the Progressives expelled
the Communists; the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, which was backed
by the Soviets, soured many of its members; and the Red Scare ravaged
its ranks. Revelations about Stalin's crimes in 1956 disillusioned many
of those who remained and dealt the party a near-fatal blow. . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/arts/20nyu.html?ei=5090&en=
01273cdb17bb63b6&ex=1332043200&partner=rssuserland&emc=
rss&pagewanted=print
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
OBAMA DIDN'T INVENT THE INTERNET; IN FACT, HE DOESN’T UNDERSTAND IT ALL
THAT WELL
TIME MAGAZINE - Barack Obama's reputation as a smart, savvy guy has to
come under fire for this laugher on Larry King last night about the
Hillary 1984 ad running on You Tube: "But it's not something that we had
anything to do with or were aware of and that frankly, given what it
looks like, we don't have the technical capacity to create something
like that. It's pretty extraordinary." The Obama campaign doesn't have
the "technical capacity" to dub an old commercial and superimpose
Hillary's face on a screen and their logo on a woman's t-shirt? What do
they have, five hamsters on wheels powering the campaign?
http://time-blog.com/real_clear_politics/2007/03/obamas_technical_
capacity.html?xid=rss-rcp
MORE POLITICAL NEWS
http://prorev.com/politics.htm
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