George Orwell: Down and Out

Theodore Adorno captured the sense of desperation and anxiety of our epoch in his Minima Moralia when he wrote that “Today it is seen as arrogant, alien and improper to engage in private activity without any evident ulterior motive. Not to be ‘after’ something is almost suspect: no help to others in the rat-race is acknowledged unless legitimized by counter-claims.” Perhaps that is why there is something remarkably intriguing about the homeless, the under-employed, and those lingering on the edges—bear-trapped outside society in the cold borderlands. Orwell understood this region and mapped it, tracing its odors and occupants, describing it in his famously clipped prose.

In Depression-era Paris, Orwell, disguised as a hobo, describes a life unknown to “respectable” bourgeois society. It is a world of poverty freed from “ordinary standards of behavior.” “Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words,” he writes. The amazing feat of so slim a text is Orwell’s powerful skill at making you scratch your arms from fear of the begbugs that crawl over him in his fleabag flophouse, or push away your dinner plate as he describes an indecorous meal, and, most potently, feel implicated in the horrors of the world. “This is your society,” he seems to accuse, “you are culpable.” Though, not much happens to him. For pages and pages I sat in rapt attention at the description of a boozy night with pals or the tedium of waiting for a charity meal. The interest he makes of boredom was surprising. Really, can poverty and being “down and out” really be boring? Tony Judt who verbally “wrote” two books while he was dying of Hodgkins disease commented that the disease was wicked, sure; he had lost the ability to move his limbs or breathe on his own. But he argued that it would be devastating to a laborer who hadn’t conducted a life of the mind.

“An educated man can put up with enforced idleness,” Orwell writes, “which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have ‘come down in the world’ are to be pitied above all others. The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.”

This is what is most cruel about the millions who sit at home, jobless and exhausted by poverty. The unemployed are holders of a secret that those who are employed just don’t or won't understand. Even the memory of unemployment seems to soften the blow. The isolation of American society is much fiercer and more evident without the necessity of work. In today’s America, where else does one spend the majority of social time? For the unemployed, the world seems to be preparing for a party for which he is not invited.

When Orwell does find work it is in the most filthy conditions. He labors in the basement of a hotel and in the greasy kitchen of a sloppy restaurant. But the most wonderful parts of the book would also be the most uncomfortable to witness in person. When Orwell and his comrades trudge from one charity to the next, the calumny they show their patrons is delicious. As the men are compelled to fall to their knees and be thankful for handouts, they mutter, grumble, and later declaim their disgust at the process. What would be seen (I’m sure) in some quarters as guttersnipe ingratitude is actually the truest expression of humanity.

“A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor,” Orwell writes. “It is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.” Charity is the poison not the cure, according to Oscar Wilde. But Orwell reveals the origins of this contempt. When he works 17 hours a day at the restaurant only to spend a charitable night upon a concrete slab next to a malnourished tramp who wants to nothing more than to roger him, well, a cup of swill and a plate of stale bread is little consolation. (Although, the coldness and quiet scorn of the robed virgins holding the ladles does make the process of hating a bit easier, too.)

Down and Out is a book that most journalists will be drawn to. Orwell’s pithy writing, dry humor, and realism is exactly what is needed to counteract the sugar and diversions of the worst popular trash our media proffers each day. Orwell did much to discredit the comforts of charity and (what Auden called) the “lie in the brain” that any work is good work. Actually, most of what Orwell spent his days doing was not productive at all. The tasks were tedious and meaningless. But such was the labor the free market desired. I ended this book not only admiring such unique reporting but feeling a bit sad—how many wasted lives of sweat and toil have been exhausted serving and living for others. How many children must be born and grow and live their brief blink of life shackled to the whims of those a bit luckier.

Carolina: Carla Ricci's Story of South County

By BRETT WARNKE

Charming and memorable stories recount the gossip, play, and struggle of small town life in South County in Carla Ricci’s documentary, Carolina. But paralleling this Rhode Island village’s sweet stories are the harsh realities of poverty, industrialization, disease, and the demise of the region’s peasantry. Nostalgia is easy to find in America today; the desire to get back to a “freer” and “simpler” time often takes the place of actual policy discussions. It’s easier rhetorically, especially around election time. Hence the cliché of running a campaign with poetry and governing in prose The strength of Ricci’s film is denying the nostalgic impulse, simplicity, or a mere oral history and instead pushing for a broader exploration of the historical and economic factors that produced Carolina’s stories.

Carolina begins in the midst of a 19^th century cholera epidemic as public health fails to keep up with the rapidity of urbanization. Rowland Hazard, an industrialist whose father had started the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, decided to create a place that was “free from the problems of the city and the poverty of the countryside.” To Ricci he was a “dreamer” with a romantic side. He named his factory “Carolina Mills Company” after his wife, Caroline Newbold Hazard who, like Rowland, was born in South Kingstown.

Hazard blew the breath of commerce into a tiny hamlet 30 miles south of Providence, which necessitated streets, parks, schools, infrastructure, and neighborhoods. Such development was unexpected. Carolina was 30 miles from New London, 155 miles from New York City, and 77 miles from Boston. One resident said pungently, “No one would suppose that any business of any kind would do business within a dozen miles of it.”

Ricci briefly explores Hazard’s complicated biography. The bearded industrialist was a profiteer of poor laborers in the North—workers who feared that their boss’s criticisms of slavery would threaten their own livelihoods. But Hazard was also a philanthropist who built schools for children—the same children who worked in his mill, earning $4.50 a week beside their fingerless fathers.

The complexities continue: Hazard spent his winters in New Orleans courting the puffed-up cotton kings who ruled the southern slavocracy. But he also aided freedmen wrongly imprisoned in the North, advised Lincoln during the Civil War, was a conscientious local representative, and protested against runaway railroad monopolies.

By the 20^th century, according to Ricci, Hazard and his successors Tinkham, Metcalf, and Company had “created an entirely new way of living” for the people who worked in the factory. This experiment in industrialization had turned a backward stony agrarian patch, once populated by goat herders, natives, and peasants, into a hamlet with quantitative material growth. As Eric Hobesbawm writes in his study of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes, “For 80% of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s…for since the Neolithic era most human beings had lived off the land and its livestock or harvested the sea as fishers.” Charlie Dyson, a 97 year old yarnspinner who was part of this seismic economic shift. He and others tell the stories of rural austerity and the toil of farm life. “We done the best we could,” he says, “But we were damn poor.”

But southern Rhode Island’s industrial boom ended earlier than the rest of America’s, concluding in 1935. With stiff competition from 2,000 other New England factories, stock speculation, and lax regulation which led to Wall Street’s 1929 collapse, Carolina Mill could no longer turn a profit. It was closed just three years before the infamous hurricane of ’38 further devastated the region.

Ricci’s film moves, if a bit clunkily at times, from decade to decade showing the small town garages, sleepy suburbanization, and local stories that occupy the life of Carolina after its prime. Some stories are interestingly tangential. The shots of Providence and the discussion of 1938 flooding in the city are interesting if not entirely relevant. But do we really need to know about the history of elm tree removal in Carolina? The intriguing investigation of the enormous Wright family—52 of whom lived in the same neighborhood—is a nice touch, but Ricci cuts off the discussion at its most interesting and complex. The ethnic rivalries and religious splintering that some of the Wright girls discuss (the children were barred from marrying someone outside their faith) is left as an anecdote. Why were these small town girls told not allowed to go to Westerly or even Hope Valley? How did small town life impact the view of the larger world of cities and towns? How have these residents since changed or maintained their views about people unlike them? Sadly, none of these questions—which would have contextualized and oriented the viewer to the reality of late 20^th century life in Carolina—are adequately addressed

The goal of a review is not to criticize an artist for what they did not set out to do, but to discuss the merits of what she did attempt. Therefore, as an exploration of Carolina’s ascent and the personal histories of individuals attached to it, Ricci’s film is worth the time of any proud Rhode Islander. Ricci said in an interview, “I wanted to make the history personal and real to the people watching it.” From the notorious Paul Broomfield, a local Grinch, who owned the ruins of the Carolina Mill and superintended the property’s decay to Charlie Dyson’s decision to go to war despite his wife’s reservations, Carolina is a documentary peopled with characters that could be found in the best fiction.

Activist’s history fuzzy, historians say

By BRETT WARNKE

     Julianne Jennings, an anthropology student with Native American heritage, has taken aim at Rhode island’s founder, Roger Williams, and is working to post a plaque that state his involvement in the selling of slaves after Providence was burned in March of 1676. The Narragansett Indians are not involved with the plaque which would be placed on South Main Street in Providence in commemoration of the Native Americans who were sent to the Caribbean plantations to work as slaves after their defeat.

The language for the proposed plaque is as follows:

                “Mequanamiinnean (Remember us): In 1636, Narragansett Sachem, Canonicus, and his people gave Missionary Roger Williams a large tract of land which later became the colony of Providence Plantation. In just 40 years, relations between the colony and the Narragansett Indians became strained as a result of frequent intercultural conflicts. After the King Philip’s War (1676-6), Roger Williams claimed the leading post to the justifiability of slavery in Rhode island by transporting Narragansett and other Indians out of the region to be sold as slaves.”

                 But many historians disagree with Jennings’ interpretation of these events as well as her credibility. Dr. Patrick Conley, the author of 18 books and several volumes about Rhode Island’s history, said that the historical records show that Roger Williams was never a missionary and that Jennings’ statements are imprecise.

                “Providence Plantation was not a ‘colony.’ It was a ‘plantation’ or a ‘settlement,’” Conley said. “Of all the colonists in New England, Roger Williams was perhaps the most cordial and fair to the Native Americans. It is most unfortunate to allow one fanatic to rewrite history to serve her own prejudices.”

Roger Williams was convicted of sedition and heresy for criticizing the English king and could have been drawn and quartered if captured by the Massachusetts Colony. But he fled the Puritans, built Providence, and forged relationships with local tribes in a manner strikingly dissimilar to the surrounding colonies.

Al Klyberg, who spent 30 years as head of Rhode Island’s Historical Society disagrees with the thrust of the plaque.

                 “It is an over-simplification of a complex relationship,” he said. “I think it is bad history. It is unbalanced and intentionally provocative. Williams’ relations with (Narragansett leaders) Canonicus and Miantonomie were really on an incredible level of genuine friendship for the 17^th century.”

The proposed plaque has been in the works since 2009. Jennings says she was inspired by the work of Rhode Island College Professor Richard Lobban, an expert on Sudan, who has created similar slave plaques to memorialize the history of New England’s slavery.

                  “This marker is in no way meant to shame people of their (of our) collective past,” Jennings wrote in an email. “Its purpose is to make possible an opportunity to educate the public from where we have been and where we are going…and to further historical accuracy that honors ‘other’ points of view.”

J. Stanley Lemons, a Rhode island historian and former professor at Rhode Island College, disagrees with Jennings’ on about every sentence and has fenced with her in newspaper columns before. In an editorial in 2009, she accused him of lacking “intellectual integrity” and he responded that she knows “little or nothing about Roger Williams” and “misunderstands or misconstrues” the complex history of Rhode Island during the 178^th century. They met before her unexpected editorial comments and Lemons was unimpressed with the depth of her historical knowledge.

                    “During our meeting, I learned how poorly educated she was,” Lemons said. “She is wrong and clearly does not know how to do research. Among other things, Roger Williams was not an Indian fighter. The idea that he was or was involved in long-term slave trading is just nuts. In an earlier version of the sign, Jennings tried to accuse Williams of destroying Indian culture by trying to Christianize them, but she had not read any of the relevant writings by Williams on the subject. By falsely calling him a ‘missionary’ she is still trying to make this assertion.”

And regarding slave trading?

                     “The extent of his ‘salve trading’ was his involvement in the disposal of the Indian prisoners after the war,” Lemons said. “Williams never owned a slave in his entire life and was opposed to ‘manstealing’ (capturing slaves) and opposed slavery’s being allowed to take root in Rhode Island. But, like everyone else, he was not opposed to disposing of dangerous war captives by shipping them out.”

The debate concerns King Philip’s War after the older tribal leaders’ (sachem’s) deaths. Younger native leaders (led by Canonchet) came to power and their relationship with the aging Williams was less intimate. Twice, Williams had given himself up to the Wampanoag Indians as a hostage to assure them that the Plymouth Colony would return one of their leaders to safety.

                      But in 1675, this goodwill had evaporated. King Philip’s War, the continent’s deadliest conflict in proportion to population, had become increasingly grisly and the tribes (seen as traitors and rebels by colonists) were being massacred. Rhode Island was invaded by a Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut militia called the United Colonies and their murderous assault at the Great Swamp in the winter of 1675 left women and children dead and native braves scattered, hungry, and desperate. The native tribes never recovered.

                      While Williams learned native language and had no part in the Swamp Massacre, he overplayed his hand in personal diplomacy. Seeing the northern colonies razed eventually spurred him to enlist in Rhode Island’s militia. When the Narragansetts and their allies finally approached Providence, he was in his 70s. His negotiations failed, the city was burned, but he was not killed.

“The warriors would not harm him after the talks broke down,” Lemons said. “That tells you something about the trust and credit that Williams had with the Narragansetts and others. He had been their allies for forty years against the efforts of the neighboring colonies who wanted to dismember and destroy Rhode Island.”

                       Paul Campbell, an archivist, wrote that after the war, Williams posed no opposition to Indian slavery, but this does he does not believe the man pushed a slavery agenda.

“One has to remember the context,” he wrote in an email. “Williams’ dream went up in smoke despite a personal plea to Canonchet to spare the town. I get the sense that he died a bitter man.”

Williams certainly died in poverty. The Providence founder spent his remaining years pleading with the Massachusetts governor to send him paper; he could not afford to pay for it himself.

But Jennings insists Roger Williams was a much darker figure than his legend. In an email she quoted from notes Roger he submitted to Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop which, upon first glance, appear to condone a sneak attack on an Indian tribe. But Professors Glenn Lafantasie and Lemons agree that these notes are Williams detailing an enemy tribe’s suggestions, not an endorsement.

Lafantasie, a researcher at Western Kentucky University who edited a two-volume set of Williams’ letters and places him among his personal heroes, also disagrees with Jennings plaque but says the Providence founder’s actions cannot be excused.

                      “From a human perspective, I can’t excuse his behavior. He did profit from the sale of those 50 or so prisoners,” Lafantasie said. “I don’t want to provide a string of excuses for old dead white men with bad behavior, but prisoners, often sold into slavery after a battle, were fair game. It was very much a part of the time and very much accepted by the English settlers.”

Local activist demands answers

Narragansett Times

By BRETT WARNKE

NARRAGANSETT--Richard Vangermeersch has compiled and is distributing a book of thirty five historical and literary readings on Canonchet, the Narragansett Tribe, and Canonchet Farm. He is an Emeritus Professor of Accounting, and current treasurer of the local advocacy group Friends of Canonchet Farm. Recently, he helped initiate the URI College of Business 75th anniversary and initiated the RICPA's 100th anniversary gathering. This year he has gone through the trouble of compiling readings about the Narragansett Indians from the past 300 years.

What does he hope to accomplish?

Specifically, he wants a memorial to the Narragansetts at Canonchet Farm, a review of the "innocence of Rhode Islanders during King Philip's War," a dialogue between historically interested groups, and to determine whether or not a part of Canonchet Farm was once considered a holy site.

Vangermeersch has intensified his advocacy, publishing a book of readings, speaking at the Peace Dale Library, and attended last month’s Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council meeting to support state archaeologist Paul Robinson’s desire to further excavate a pristine Native American village discovered on private property.

"The history of the Narragansetts needs a strong collaborative effort between tribe historians and non-tribe historians. I hope my new collection spurred such interests," he wrote in the introduction to his self-published collection Canonchet, The Narragansetts, and Canonchet
Farm: A Collection of Annotated Readings. The collection includes older readings by Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper and contemporary writers like Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Mayflower.
King Philip's War (1675-6) is the bloody beginning of Vangermeersch's research. "I wonder how many people in Rhode Island are aware of the importance of King Philip's War, Canonchet, and the Narragansetts in U.S. history." Vangermeersch asked.
The conflict ended decades of collaboration between settlers and Indians nearly one hundred years before Thomas Paine coined the term “The United States.” In the 1670s after the 20,000 natives (4,000 of which were Narragansetts) were surrounded on all sides by colonial settlements, the settlers formed the "United Colonies." In 1675, led by the militantly anti-Indian Josiah Winslow of the Plymouth colony, the settler army fell on the besieged Narragansetts in their winter forest encampment near West Kingston. The fort itself was a "palisaded village" or a "stockade" in the words of Benjamin Church, who wrote notes after he was wounded in the
fight.

According to John Brown, the Narragansett Tribe’s current Education Director, the Great Swamp Massacre left three hundred warriors dead, three hundred and fifty captured, and between 300 and 1,000 women and children dead. 68 English were killed or died of their wounds and 150 recovered.

“Our tribe is still living the legacy of that cold, bleak December night.”

Vangermeersch's compilation is comprised of historical and literary writings about topics that are prickly, a history that was brutal, and ethnic relationships that are unhealed. He found a 1925 obituary for Ezbon S. Taylor from the Narragansett Times. Taylor died in 1925 and was considered an expert on the Narragansett Tribe but his book about the Narragansetts was never published and has never been found.

Taylor writes in a 1921 article, "In going up Beach Street you cross the foot bridge that goes into the grounds of Canonchet [Farm]...you will find twin rocks standing erect on sort of table rock. They are called 'Squaw Rocks.' They mark the spot of a great Indian massacre which must have taken place before or at the time of the Great Swamp Fight about 1675. I sincerely trust that they be preserved and a fitting tablet be placed thereon to perpetuate the memory of the once famous and powerful tribe of Indians--the Narragansetts and Niantics--which were treated as one and the same nation at one time holding jurisdiction over most of the state of Rhode Island, numbering about 4,000 men, the friends and allies of our fathers."
Vangermeersch has taken up the struggle where Taylor left off. At this week's Town Council meeting he suggested that John Miller be approved as the honorary Town Historian. And recently, Vangermeersch won a small victory at Canonchet Farm. A clearing was cut through the tangle of thorny bushes surrounding a cluster of glacial erratics, what Vangermeersch calls, and “strange rocks."

For years, the rocks have been covered with leaves, and hidden by underbrush and second growth but now that they are cleared Vangermeersch has questions: "Is this a holy site? The site of a historically documented massacre? How did these rocks get here? They are laid out like an amphitheater and it seems as if they have been strategically placed. But, honestly, we don't know yet."
The Narragansett Tribe has had no shortage of negative press in recent years. Recent hopes for the right to build affordable housing on portion of Charlestown property collapsed this month despite an intense lobbying effort by the tribe’s Chief Sachem, Matthew Thomas. In 2006, too, the tribe made headlines regarding a ballot question for a casino in Charlestown. The tribe backed the proposal but it was rejected by voters. And in 2003, state police raided a tax free smoke shop opened up by the Narragansett Tribe.

Vangermeersch says he has felt the air drained from a room when he raises issues about Rhode Island's history and the Narragansett Indian tribe.

"I'm not talking about smoke shops and casinos, I'm talking about burial grounds and holy sites...but sometimes people hear what they want to hear." Vangermeersch sees the recent money issues as having a toxic influence on relations between the tribe and local townspeople. "Trying to talk about this history is so difficult. There has been three hundred and thirty five years of continual distrust. What people who live in Rhode Island don't know is that things are not better for the tribe now than they were," Vangermeersch said.

Evidence of the history is all around South County, pieces of it appear like clues in an unsolved crime. There are the rocks in Canonchet and in South Kingstown on Tower Hill. There is Bull's Garrison marker where Jireh Bull's home was burned by Native Americans in Dec. 1675. There is also a statue, standing between Narragansett Beach and the Towers. The
eight foot carving, believed to be the Narragansett leader Canonicus, stands alone in Memorial Square. Looking down Vangermeersch shook his head in disappointment, "There should be a label here. How are people supposed to put this history together?"

Ideally, Vangermeersch would like to gather representatives from the Tomaquog Museum in Exeter, Narragansett's town officials, representatives from the Narragansett Tribe, the Friends of Canonchet Farm, state archaeologist Paul Robinson, a representative from the Museum of Primitive Art and Culture, and faculty from URI, Brown, and Rhode Island College for a dialogue. The topics would be various, but interpreting Rhode Island's past for the public would be Vangermeersch's main goal.
"There are people who know more than I know but they're not participating," he said. He laughed with a bit of despair and said, "We're getting there. This is what slow progress looks like." Later, he admitted, "I just can't do this on my own and it is taking more time than I thought to get people together on this issue."

Local Nuclear Facility. Asset or Hazard?

By BRETT WARNKE

NARRAGANSETT—As Japan reels from the aftermath of a crippling tsunami, it has led experts of all kinds to debate the utility of atomic energy. Today, 30 percent of South County’s power comes from a nuclear plant in Waterford, Conn., and Narragansett’s own Nuclear Science Center research reactor on the University of Rhode Island Bay Campus is humming quietly, for now. One critic, former Rep. Ray Rickman, is sending a letter to Gov. Lincoln Chafee demanding answers about the cost, safety, and future of the 47 year old facility.

The reactor was built in 1964 and, while it was constructed by General Electric (the same engineer of the 35 year old Japanese plants in Japan) it is 2,000 times smaller than those energy facilities, about the size of a barrel. It does not have a pressurized system and does not create power. Its fuel is funded by the Department of Energy, it is owned by the state, and is inspected by the federal government. For fiscal year 2011 it will cost the state $1.49 million.

The reactor has gone through many improvements and changes, according to Distinguished Professor Bahram Nassersharif of URI. In 1992, for example, the type of fuel the reactor uses was changed. Nasshersharif expects the reactor survive 20 more years and explains that if the facility were to be constructed today it would cost $!00 million.

“We have won many research and education awards,” Nassersharif said. “The latest achievement was when my students won first prize last year at the National American Nuclear Society student design competition. Their design was for the ‘sample transport system and radioactive material depository’ which has now been installed at the reactor.”

Each semester, students from URI, Roger Williams University, Providence College, as well as students from New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Connecticut use the reactor for experiments, research and learning. Students, who use the facility two or three times a semester, conduct atmospheric data analysis on the smallest amount of pollutants and particles and have taken ice core samples they collected from the Arctic region and can analyze their composition by running them through the reactor.

“It is absolutely wonderful and spectacular that we have it for students to use,” Nassersharif said. “We’re lucky to have it.”

Terry Tehan, the director of the facility, insists the facility is safe. He wrote that over one hundred advanced degrees in chemistry, physics and engineering have been awarded based on the use of the facility and as numerous papers including Dr. Jean-Guy Shilling’s work on neutron activation analysis, studies on neutron scattering, and a student who used the reactor to study the mechanics of oil spills. URI interns have also been working on projects including the sample transfer system, which won the American Nuclear Society competition. Additional changes are planned for the reactor control room and other aspects of the facility to keep its instrumentation and controls up to date.

However, despite this information (or because of it) Rep. Ray Rickman is skeptical about the merit of the facility.

“I’m worried about the materials ending up in the Bay; not the materials exploding. This place should be closed and decommissioned.”

Rickman, who runs a consulting firm in Providence and is secretary of the Rhode island Historical Society and former President of the Black Heritage Society, has spent the last 20 years attempting to close the nuclear facility, one he considers expensive and unsafe.

“It is an absurdity to put out this kind of money in this small, old, little-used reactor. It is not a priority for the state right now in this fiscal climate,” he said.

He claims that the facility has yielded no substantive awards and no original research and is currently drafting a letter to Governor Chafee expressing his concerns.

“I want to know about the current security and I want the Chafee administration to detail in writing that this nuclear facility is secure. We need to know how the state plans to evacuate citizens in case of a disaster. You can imagine, like all governments when these disasters occur, throwing up their hands and trying to figure out what to do.”

Rickman says that he has read the federal reports and he calls them “skimpy.”

“What you have here is very loose state supervision—very loose,” he said.

He said the facility is a concept model created as a public subsidy to the private industry in a bygone era and argues there is no reason students could not do research in nearby universities.

“Give students $500 a year to take the train to MIT and save the state 1.5 million bucks,” he said.

The director of the facility will earn, roughly, $160, 962 in fiscal year 2012 and earned $156, 364 in 2011. According to Peter Dennehy of the Division of Legal Services, this and close amounts were authorized by the state, though they may not have been exactly received in a given year.

“Who should be receiving a $42,000 raise over an eight year period in these slim economic times?” Rickman asked. “as a former state representative and former Deputy Secretary of State, I reviewed this salary 20 and then 10 years ago. It just keeps climbing. And for what service?”

But Rickman says he is not only concerned about the money that would be saved. Recently, he went to the facility and took pictures with his telephone camera but no one stopped him.

“Then I took out my big camera and took 50 pictures and no one came out. I wanted someone to come out and yell at me, just so I would know that it as secure,” he said.

He expects that if the facility were canceled, it would take roughly three years and up to $2.5 million. Director Tehan said the facility is not open to the public and cannot be toured because of safety regulations after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Stories from Rhode Island's Floodwaters

By Brett Warnke

After the floodwaters drowned her home in Bradford, R.I. last March, Danielle King, 38, and her three girls lived in a temporary shelter for nine days. When she finally crossed the plastic yellow tape she wore garbage bags around her feet. Gazing at the debris, she knew her children’s beds were destroyed but she also knew she didn’t have enough money to afford new ones. Community action paid for a hotel for her family and—having nothing but the clothes they were wearing—offered clothing, shoes, and gift cards for household items.

The money that assisted Danielle came from the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG). The grant and community action programs themselves have been an enduring legacy of the Great Society programs but last month, during President Obama’s state of the union, he placed them on the butcher’s block. Having extended tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans in December, Obama has proposed slashing funds to the neediest in areas already stung by unemployment and mugged by Wall Street’s recklessness. If the cuts are made, the President will have disemboweled the programs in ways that no right-wing populist ever could.

In 1969 Daniel Moynihan wrote that community action was “the most notable effort to date to mount a systematic social response” to integrate ethnic minorities into government. “It must stand,” he wrote in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, “as a perceptive and timely initiative.” He wrote that he would have focused community action’s strategy around employment. They adapted.

Since then, community action has performed quiet but necessary tasks which have gone underreported and taken for granted. They helped crack apart political machines and set the standard for grass-roots organizations; they are the “go to” agencies in communities which now focus on self-sufficiency and even offer classes to teach people to pay their taxes.

Cuts to these grants are indecent and unserious and they will hurt the Northeast. Local politicians, like cats before a quake, are jumping at the proposed cuts. Senators John Kerry, Sheldon Whitehouse, Jack Reed, and other local politicians have written letters opposing cuts and so has the U.S. Conference of Mayors. 100 metropolitan areas throughout the country are projecting double digit employment. They argue that grant funds created jobs, leveraged economic development, built infrastructure, promoted home ownership, and supported energy improvement.

Paula McFarland, the Executive Director of Rhode Island’s C.A.A. proudly showed me the bi-annual reports she discloses. In four years she has never received a criticism, comment, or recognition of receipt! These unread reports include pages of documentation, graphs, narrative, and figures. Every jot and tittle details the 109,000 people in Rhode Island assisted on a meager budget. Rhode Island is not alone, as the Globe reported, in 2010, community action served over 2,700 people in Summerville, Mass., including Head Start.

Who advocates for successful agencies when a President does not follow-up with his own administration, the media won’t or can’t cover its successes as they occur, and its patrons are some of the country’s neediest? This is the dilemma of community action.

Look at the White House website. Community Action is eighth on the President’s “top ten performers” for federal stimulus funds. $5 billion were funneled into the program for weatherization projects in 2009. It is either mordantly funny or tragically ironic that President Obama, a community organizer during the unsentimental Reagan years, intends to cut community action, one of his administration’s greatest successes.

According to a recent Brown University study, half of respondents affected by Rhode Island’s 2010 floods applied for FEMA assistance, 52 percent, and about half did not, 48 percent. Of the respondents only 25 percent received it. Gertrude Simmons, 71, a Warwick widow whose basement was destroyed in the floods was rejected by FEMA three times for a flood inspection. Her daughter and granddaughter have endured a fierce winter with no heat or insulation in their basement, but Gertrude knew about community action from previous help with heating assistance. Once she called the program she had new walls and carpet from block grant money within a month. “We were so cold but the men that community action sent in finished work within a month,” she said. “I wish I had something I could give them to say thanks, they deserve it. But I am having problems.”

Obama's Onslaught on Community Action by Brett Warnke published in Counterpunch

By BRETT WARNKE

Having left the Wall Street Journal to interview National Community Action Foundation’s Director David Bradley after President Obama’s State of the Union sneak attack on the country’s community action programs, the New York Times has gone a step further in its neglect of a serious social issue. On Sunday Feb. 6 the newspaper published an editorial by White House Budget Director Jacob Lew, which called for a 50 per cent cut in financing for the Community Services Block Grant. Here was an unprecedented slash to a successful liberal program—one which has received scant review either by theTimes or the President himself The famously noisy editorial staff offered no comment.

In his State of the Union President Obama said he has “proposed cuts to things I care deeply about, like community action programs.” Since the President mentioned only this one program for proposed cuts, he could have at least forewarned Executive Director David Bradley who was seated in the gallery. He didn’t.

When I interviewed Director Bradley he said, “I think this is a sea change, not a fiscal year change. What we are seeing is numerous agencies—good ones—all competing for the same federal dollars. What this proposed cut has done to our network has sent us a chilling message. It says that our leaders have seen the goodwill expressed towards our work in communities and the successful work of our agencies—especially in the downturn—but are telling us, ‘No thanks.’ That is a hard bitter message to swallow.”

Never mind that the Obama administration has failed to follow up on community action’s recent successes with weatherization and has not even appointed a member to head the program’s federal parent, the Health and Human Service Department (HHS).

Community action is 46 years old, a breathing and important creation of Great Society programs. The organization impacts 9.3 million households and works with Head Start, workforce training, health, nutrition, and energy conservation. In 2009, five billion dollars from the program went toward nationwide energy-saving weatherization projects that affecting 300,000 people. Yet Obama’s declared intention to cut funds to this demonstrably successful organization—one that his own Cabinet members and website praises as a “top 10 performer”—a decision which goes further in jeopardizing this valuable program than any free marketeer ever has.

While George W. Bush hoped for cuts in community action, Congressional Democrats kept the dollars flowing. Nixon kept his hands off the program while Reagan and Bush went after it, albeit unsuccessfully. In the mid ‘90s, the Gingrich gang plotted to deny the Community Services Block Grant—community action’s fiscal oxygen—but Director Bradley, a protégé of the late Sargent Shriver, in a feat of impressive political jujitsu, used the opportunity to parade the successes of community action before Congress.

He won. Not only did community action receive funding, it saw a $100 million increase from the Reaganaut authors of Contract with America!

It is important to watch Obama’s “move to the middle” (as many are calling his recent caving to Republican domestic demands) because it seems a retrograde move only a consensus-loving Democrat could make. Daniel Patrtick Moynihan famously wrote to Nixon reminding the old Quaker criminal that it was “Tory men with liberal policies who have enlarged democracy.” And if that truism is overblown the last twenty years have definitively proven the inverse: Those on the liberal end of the respectable spectrumwith conservative policies do the worst damage. In campaign ’92, candidate Clinton’s opportunistic criticism of George Bush Sr.’s brave threat to deny America’s loan guarantees to Israel had significant repercussions. Running to the political right of Bush on this point, Clinton’s maneuver subsequently shackled Democrats to whatever reactionary, settler-friendly government Israel put up. Again, but this time in the domestic realm, Clinton proposed the infamous welfare “reform.” This crippling blow to the New Deal was a shameless swing to the right—a piece of legislation far more merciless to children living in poverty than anything conservatives had seriously proposed.

Obama’s recent toss (admittedly long overdue) of the “don’t ask don’t tell” repeal to his liberal base has given him cover for abandoning costly and disheartening economic fights with Republicans. But slashing community action—not a perfect program but an important one—is not worth the pain it will cause to those busted by the reprehensible and unpunished actions of bankers.

Operating on a $700 million block grant with $1.5-2 billion in other programs (the stimulus funds were atypical) the program is a dollop in the context of a $14 trillion dollar debt and $15 trillion dollar economy. Moreover, most of the households that will feel the cuts will be in rural and suburban areas where the working poor and slipping middle class families have been struck hardest. And while, say, 200 non-for profits in New York are undoubtedly reeling in this economic climate, they offer undeniably more services and opportunities for aid than non-urban zones. For example, in a state with declining population like Michigan where laid off workers in Jackson and Flint increasingly rely on their local community action agencies—many times not knowing that they are federally funded—to whom will they turn to for help?

“Travelling around economically hard-hit places I was struck by the trust families had for local community action agencies,” Bradley told me. “I met families that never dreamed that they would have to rely on an agency for help. They just never paid attention to the program up the road from their house. Now they’re coming in saying, “Please, help us.” Now time after time people say, ‘Without this assistance, I don’t know what our families would be doing.’”

While community action is small in comparison to other spending by the government, the work of its 1,000 agencies represents some successes of Obama’s slim and varied stimulus package and the importance of a net, however frayed and overstretched we keep it. The intention, according to Budget Director Lew is to save $350 million. But by singling out community action, Obama is losing an opportunity of equal value to the tax-cut fight/ “hostage crisis” he ran away from in December. Obama is sawing at the very limb on which he rests--the cuts will hurt the working poor, punish successful government, illustrate how sadly out of touch he is with the workings of his own administration, and allow for further cuts to successful programs in the future. If community action can be cut, what program can’t? And if such successful programs (which are now competing for the same federal dollars) are gutted because of an economic deterioration brought about by our piggish financial class, the truth of who is in charge of this republic has been baldly revealed.

Brett Warnke is a journalist currently living in Rhode Island. He is a recent graduate of the New School for Social Research and can be reached
at brettwarnke@gmail.com.

Hera Gallery Goes Green

By BRETT WARNKE

             "Burn your money,” read a leftist pamphlet from the wild summer of 1968. “Burn your houses and you will be free.” Mainstream America would hear none of it. Economic radicalism of this sort vanished, or was marginalized, while related movements against the subordination of women, supporting civil rights, and opposing the invasion of Vietnam survived into the 1970s.

But the grand 60s coalitions collapsed and money, which Shakespeare called “a visible God” and “the common whore of mankind,” survived. Hera Gallery (named for the formidable Greek goddess) opened in 1974, at a moment when America’s socio-economic and political activism began to fade. The art gallery was a small, non-profit cooperative jointly
owned and operated by twelve women. The new sisterhood was comprised of Southern Rhode Islanders who hoped to establish a gallery—“a cultural force” in the region—that would challenge a status quo in which women were prevented from showing their art.

Hera, a small honeycomb, sits between the two artistic hives of New York City and Boston. Consequently, the women who began the cooperative gallery desperately relied on the monthly dues of each member to keep Hera’s buzzing. The ironically named Roberta Richman,
a founding member, wrote “We had plenty of reinforcement from each other and the community, but money was scarce.” Only three such cooperative galleries still exist. While Hera’s mission began with the question of “what it means to be a woman artist” it has since changed. Now, according to the Gallery Director, Islay Taylor, the newly re-opened gallery still holds its “feminist undercurrents” but smartly adapted itself, posing a different question for a different
age: “What does it mean to be an artist in a community?”

Perhaps this new query and the gallery’s new exhibit entitled “Money,” derive from the historical moment Hera and its artists find themselves in; an age of global capitalism, fractured communities, constant movement, hyper-individualism, and endemic uncertainty. One Hera member I met told me money was “the hot topic in everybody’s life today.” Other loudly topical themes in Hera’s recent past have
included “American Democracy Under Siege” and “The Environment Under Siege.”

Adorning the walls and gracing gallery stands are prints, paintings, sculptures, and sketches selected by Newport Art Museum’s Nancy Whipple Granell, the show’s guest curator. Each curious and interesting work in this thematic show critically looks at money. The
exhibit is not large (Hera’s building was a former laudromat) but the stronger works are layered in complexity. Taylor, as she showed me around said, “I look at money differently than before this show; now I see it more as fine art.”

A good example of this is “We.” It is a close-up photo of a paper bill by Susan Hayward which, at first, resembles the simple shapely contours of a Rudy Burckhardt photograph. On its face the work is a contrast between the acute slopes of the “We” and the rigid lettering of the “if” below. Yet, the very history which brought Hera’s into being—the progressive collectivist spirit—is locked within that curvaceous “We.”

Beneath it, sitting beside liberty’s fiery torch is that stumpy terrifying “if.” Two letters identifying the possibility of a different world, a Just City. If anything, Hayward shows us that
there is more to notice on our cash than “In God We Trust.” Money is a sketch of a dollar bill by Jason Lee Taylor. It recalls the radical cartoons of William Gropper and the Social Realism of Jack Levine. Mr. Taylor’s bill no longer has the face of a respected leader—a ‘sovereign’ whose face historically legitimized printed currency. Instead, “Dow Jones” personified in an Uncle Sam’s hat is the bill’s iconic face. He wears a gas mask protecting him from the stink of a rotten system he oversees. Hera’s new exhibit is an intriguing look at America’s national obsession. The exhibit has few images of people, illustrating the de-personalizing effects of the almighty greenback. But several of its works speak loudly about life in a moneyed world. Martin Amis once wrote “Money, I think is uncontrollable. Even those of us who have it, we can’t control it. Life gets poor-mouthed all the time, yet you seldom hear an unkind word about money.” If ever there was a place for such a critique, it was in this gallery. While small, Hera’s holds within its walls so much history and hangs on its walls so much possibility.

Civil War resurrected in Newport

By BRETT WARNKE
NEWPORT, Ft. Adams-It takes certain intensity in one's personality to slip on a wool uniform in the July heat before bivouacking next to a fire in an abandoned fort. And that is what over 200 Civil War enthusiasts did this past weekend at the nation's largest coastal defense facility, Ft.
Adams. The weekend's events included historical interpretation, a battle, a skirmish, historic displays, cooking, and encampment information.
The Civil War program was set in Ft. Adams, the 871,000 square foot defense fortress constructed in an age without hydraulics (and therefore by hand) between 1825 and 1857. The impregnable fortress never endured a hostile bullet and was built as a reaction to Newport's infamous occupation by British General George Clinton (1776-1779). Half the population of Revolutionary Newport--then the fifth largest city in the colonies--abandoned the city because of patriot loyalties, leaving the city to the Tories and the Bay to the whims of the British. Ft. Adams was built to ensure the defense of the nation's east coast.

Each summer the fort hosts a historical program. The Civil War weekend's reenactors each took upon roles, specific occupations, which they educated the public about in extraordinary detail. One of the reenactors, an engineer named "Major" James Duarte, staked out a position along the five-foot thick slate and granite walls which once housed thirty-seven cannons. "The balls were filled with black powder," he corrected, when questioned about dynamite. An engineer, according to Duarte, was the general's indispensable man.

“If you need a tower, or a design...if you need to create a sawmill or a bridge, who do you go to? The engineer! The engineer would tell the general where he's been, where he is, and how to get to where he's going."
They were also responsible for producing defense plans, roads, reconnoitering, and map-making. It was engineers, Duarte said, who used steam technology to surpass 32lb. cannon balls with 80-100 lb cannon balls. At the beginning of the Civil War there were less than fifty engineers in the country. Many like P.G. T. Beauregard, Joseph E. Johnston, and General Robert E. Lee were graduates of West Point who became commanders and used both paid and slave labor for their own engineering projects. Though the role was high-pressure, there were benefits. Engineers were given four horses and paid $86 a month, much better than a foot soldiers' $13 per month. Yet, to nearby Raymond and Marianne Germaine it was the Acting Assistant
Adjutant General, an intermediary between government and the army, who was the indispensable man.

"If you needed to find a soldier, to get a decision made or confirmation from the higher-ups-if you need to find or file a document or an order, who would you go to? The Adjutant General!" Without bureaucrats and clerks, Germaine argued, how could any decision
get passed along?
By midday Saturday the heat weighed like alp on the few exposed troops. Three "Confederates," Jacob Fish, Paul Maynard, and Mike Yutesher, laid drowsily in a meager tent on the south side of Ft. Adams, waiting for the approaching battle. To these twenty-somethings, troops were what the war was about. One soldier complained that his troops had a tougher time in last summer's battle than the others. And as expected, to these young men, the numbers of troops were what really made an army. "At a recent reenactment of Picket's charge, there were 9,000 Confederates and 6,000 Union troops. That was the real deal, with all those guys on the field. I think at Gettysburg there were 26,000 people!"
The various reenactors each have their own stories about how they started living the double life of a historical interpreter. Beth Singley of Massachusetts currently leads a twenty-five person Alabama regiment, organizing communications and an annual meeting. Years ago
she stumbled across a Civil War reenactment when her son was twelve and never looked back. "It's a great time; it's a family unit," she said. Others come because of the chance to teach, mentioning authors Shelby Foote, Bruce Canton, Edwin Bears, James MacPherson, and Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs.

"These reenactments give you a truer sense of the history," said Mike Flye, working as an ordnance sergeant. "The last soldier to die who fought in the Civil War made it until the 1950s. Without the real soldiers, younger people will need history they can touch. A kid might not be able to touch a 'real' 186 3 water canteen, but we've got a facsimile that he can handle."
"The Mayor of Coventry, Connecticut," his third summer at Ft. Adams, was also educating the public. "The Mayor," Ryley Blouin, received his political nickname from a middle school principal. His youthful appearance belies his adult manner and limitless memory. While his
grandfather, John O'Brien, a retired navyman was describing the history of "force multiplier" cannons and the change in firepower after the battle of Waterloo, the fourteen year old Mayor Blouin greeted a renewing audience with the history of an 1841 cannon, details about 'factory
fashion' weapons, and the weight and ferocity of "grape shot." Ryley was strictly business, "Everyone, please stand in this area so you can hear."

He corralled curious patrons with the efficiency of a sheepherder. There was no levity regarding materials either. The Mayor imperiously called out "Two hands, please!" as the lead ammunition was passed. The question of course arose: Where would a general be without proper artillery power? Perhaps it was the gunners who were the real indispensable men?

The narrator of Saturday's 2:30 battle, a former infantryman himself, would disagree. Outside Ft. Adams's walls, smoke billowed above howling, bugling Confederates and the Union's drumming "Bluebellies." One former US infantry soldier and reenactor narrated the events of the battle. Playing the role of both narrator and topographical engineer, the soldier
detailed why General "Stonewall" Jackson was so effective.

"It was a little known man who knew the ground-Jedediah Hotchkiss—who was largely responsible," said the soldier. "What does a general need to know? The ground. The terrain. Who tells him that? The topographical engineer! Without Hotchkiss, the battle might have been lost."

Clearly, this role was the most important.