On the Deaths of Cockburn, Hughes, and Vidal

By Brett Warnke

First, the death of political journalist Alexander Cockburn, then the essayist and novelist Gore Vidal, and now the art critic and historian Robert Hughes.  This year, the English-language polemic has taken a rapid-fire assault to the head.  If ever there were critics, equipped with the sorcery of forceful argument, it was these three conjurers.  Their prose could sing and scream (Hughes), slice and scorn (Vidal), as well as slash and burn (Cockburn).  Yes, they brought style to the tedium of public affairs.  But beyond this, these three writers brought not only radical attitudes, but radical arguments.

            In the case of Hughes, a Time magazine critic and author, warning against the art establishment’s journey into the flooded basement of post-modernism was more risky then than it seems now.  One must remember how many influential millionaires Hughes must have pissed off and how many of society’s elite he must have humiliated.  His was a voice not of reaction, though his shredded targets claimed this.  “I have never been against new art as such,” he argued.  “Some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.”  He could scrape off an artist’s gimmicky coating and leave them bare for reasoned evaluation.  He also pushed criticism to its highest form, one in which the critique becomes a necessary reference in the interpretation of a work.  I’ll admit, I still can’t read a memoir without a smirk, remembering Hughes’ pungent corollary:  “The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. The memoirs of Julian Schnabel, such as they are, remind one that the converse is also true. The unlived life is not worth examining.” 

Hughes’s writing demanded that the new generation of critics grapple with past titans before evaluating the “merely new.”  The quality and power within the history of art was not quaint, but necessary.  To Hughes, who sculpted and shaped wood in his free time just as he polished his unmatched prose, the very task of a critic was unending personal training.   Thinking was perfected through rigorous exchange with other thinkers in a tumble and clash of ideas; this would inform description and strengthen argument.  Who in today’s newsrooms is fortunate to have such exchanges?  Hughes, himself, could change direction in his evaluations, even of Warhol.  And The Great Aussie was never an indiscriminate hater.  In his amazing series “American Visions” (heaven’s gift to every secondary social studies teacher), assaults on artists like Thomas Hart Benton were salted with adoration for Jack Levine or Lucian Freud.    

            Like Hughes and Vidal, Cockburn was a choosey lover and a righteous hater.  A columnist, author, and pamphleteer, he started his own newsletter and wrote a “Beat the Devil” column for a quarter of a century at The Nation.  The word that comes most quickly to mind in regards to a Cockburn polemic is “onslaught,” from the Dutch aanslag, for attack.  When I sent my first freelance piece to Alex’s Counterpunch in 2011, I was writing about Obama’s cuts to community action programs.  I had no headline, no dek.  “No problem” Alex wrote me.  He immediately christened my meager piece:  “Obama’s Onslaught on Community Action.” In many of his interviews, articles, and speeches, the word arises again.  Yet, for this spiky writer, was it not the world that had undertaken an onslaught on all that he had known and cared for?  While Vidal, Hughes, and (another fallen star) Christopher Hitchens, travelled on the circuit, Cockburn secluding himself in the hills of northern California.  And from his leafy perch, he hunted liberals.  Not content attacking his own publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel, he leapt upon his fellow Nation columnists, like Eric Alterman whom he called a “bedraggled little plume on the funeral hearse of the Democratic Party.”  Yet, Cockburn was unique:  a sunny Jacobin, not a radical pessimist like Vidal or Hughes.  He would urge the left to “be of good cheer” just as he could, without irony, bring a tumbril to a small crowd and re-enact Robespierre’s purges. 

            Contrastingly, Vidal had no blood lust for the elite.  From his view as elite son and expatriate, he wanted to shake America’s elite of their sanctimony and illusions.  He demanded they wise-up.  But he was no mere “reformer.”  As he wrote in one of his most excellent collections, “The word ‘radical’ derives from the Latin word for root.  Therefore if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical.”  He scratched the surface of public life with his aphorisms and wit but dug at America’s roots in his fiction.  It was as if, through his voluminous creations and evaluations, Vidal believed thought and history could redirect the wayward Republic.  Or that a truer past could be revealed, say, by disclosing Lincoln’s syphilis.  One of his cleverest creations, Charlie Schuyler of 1876, was like the author—both insider and outsider—paid by the establishment but not paid for. 

             What these three men produced was more than stylish copy, though there was plenty of that.  They generated proof in the power of the written rebellion, real fighting words.  Admittedly, they were imperfect men; but is it really necessary to even write that?  Cockburn's absurd assertion that Stalin's victimes were far less than has been documented by Robert Conquest and others gave me pause.  As did his ignorance about the fact of climate change.  Vidal, too, collapsed into a rambling and conspiratorial shadow of himself in the dark close of the Bush years.  But their commitment and contributions to the written word remain.  And their work needs distinction from the lachrymose babbling of the loony right and the wised-up snark in liberal "critiques," both of which seem ever blessed with the label of “dissent.”  True dissent consists in understanding the role of the writer, the traveler who bears the weighty responsibility of seeking out and revealing truths.  On that ever darkening road, the company of Hughes and Vidal and Cockburn will be missed.  

The Twilight War: By David Crist

The image of twilight elicits a bright day shrinking slowly into night.  As we see from Mossadeq to the hostages and from Iran-Contra to recent cyberattacks, the relationship between Iran and the United States was born at night and has struggled through the dark ever since.  Upon reading David Crist’s 572 page history that documents the three-decade long non-relationship, can anyone describe our policies as anything but a needless and enduring failure?  Crist, a historian for the federal government and advisor on Middle East issues, has produced The Twilight War:  The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran, a clear arc from tragedy to farce in this very special relationship.   

Crist begins in the collapsing scenery of Shah Pahlavi’s detested reign and ends with Obama’s success in leading an international coalition towards comprehensive sanctions on a thirty-three year old “Islamic Republic.”  His narrative is not just stuffed with excellent anecdotes about covert activities (did you know that during the Cold War U.S. war planners hid caches of weapons and explosives in Eastern Europe?) it exposes the inner workings of bad and worse policymaking.  

There are also some delicious cameos:  The US hawking F-16’s to Sheik Hamad bin isa Al-Khalifa (the future king of Bahrain) as a bulwark against Iran.  The cat-clever Kuwaiti emirs who manipulated both the Soviets and the U.S.  And Moammar Gadaffi, insane as ever, sinking sixteen ships in the 1980s by inexplicably mining the Red Sea.

And the details about our own leadership are provocative as well.  If William Hartung’s excellent Prophets of War showed Reagan napping as defense contractors feasted on the Treasury, Crist’s portrait is of a dithering mooncalf.  Upon defeating Carter, Reagan refused to meet with the Joint Chiefs (a cheap snub) and began pushing the CIA to supply resources to Iraq, Iran’s longtime foe.  Crist cites the smug “realist” Richard Armitage saying, ““Neither side [of the Iran-Iraq War] was a good guy.  It’s a pity the war could not have lasted forever.”  With the help of U.S. and many members of NATO, the gunrunners earned their cash, and the protracted conflict ended with a whimper after eight years with nearly a million dead.   

During the war, when the Iranian ally Hezbollah kidnapped seven hostages, Reagan decided that he could do business with Iran.  After all, he had written letters citing America and Iran’s mutual religiosity as a reason to ally against the Soviets. (Of course, this was right before his administration supplied fabricated Soviet invasion plans.) 

But before Reagan's notorious, unconstitutional arms-for-hostages scheme supplied guns to the mullahs and offered American society the lachrymose speeches of Oliver North, Defense Secretary Weinberger supplied the President an admonition:  “This will undermine…our entire effort to contain Iran.  We will lose all credibility with our allies.  There are legal problems here, Mr. President, in addition to the policy problems.  It violates the Arms Export Control Act, even if done through the Israelis.  It violates our arms embargo against Iran.  It is illegal.” 

Reagan responded to Weinberger and other critics, “Well, the American people will never forgive me if big, strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free the hostages over this legal question.”  

Then on Nov. 13 he lied to the public about the deal and his sordid role in the deal.  As the great Alexander Cockburn once wrote of Reagan, “Truth…was what he happened to be saying at the time.”  Crist is less certain.  “Whether the president deliberately lied or was merely self-delusional remains debatable,” he writes, “but the United States had not only negotiated with a declared terrorist regime, but sold senior officers of the military arm of the Islamic Revolution—the Revolutionary Guard—planeloads of advanced weapons that could easily be used for offensive action.  They had even provided [the Iranians] a tour of the White House.”    

   The last minute pardons by Bush 41 nixed the multiple indictments that would have exposed the shameful and illegal behavior of those sheltered by the interstices of the national security state. Ironically, Khomeini would later turn U.S. weapons on the superpower in minor clashes that Crist describes with pointillistic detail.    

It is the contradictions of our position with Iran that are the most vexing about The Twilight War.  It seems that whenever U.S. policymakers were serious about a rapprochement—the mullahs would shout vitriol that Americans pols would take too seriously.  (And vice versa).  “The U.S. saw threats everywhere,” Crist writes.  And the conservatives in Iran’s leadership were even worse.  Iran would offer a “Roadmap” in 2003 that would address every issue of contention between Iran and the US—agreeing to full transparency in its nuclear program and agreed to halt its support for Hamas and take actions that would lead to a demilitarization of Hezbollah. 

What did the Iranians want?  A stop to “regime change” policies, turn over MEK members, and to recognize Iran’s “legitimate security interest in the region.”  They also wanted a statement that withdrew Iran from the ‘axis of evil’.  Kharrazi, Iran’s ambassador to France said in a statement:  “We are ready to normalize relations.”  But all this went nowhere and was undermined by narrow ideology, bogus preconceptions, lack of imagination, and bureaucratic suspicion. 

Oh, and terrible American leadership. 

            George H.W. Bush, for instance, communicated to the Iranians that “goodwill leads to goodwill.”  But as was his custom, Bush lied and reversed himself for political expediency.  The corrupt but pliable President Rafsanjani was abandoned and the toughs in Tehran—the Revolutionary Guard, the supreme leader, the Guardian council, and the parliament-- denounced moderation with Americans.  If Reagan set back the relationship through contradictions and dithering, Bush worsened it through cynicism and hubris.  Then, unbelievably, hoping for a deal with newly elected Bill Clinton, Rafsanjani awarded a $1 billion contract to Conoco to develop an underwater oil field.  Contract on America Republicans (along with the craven Clinton) killed the deal because they wanted to rub elbows with Israel! As you may remember, Clinton’s eight years were a nullity—save scandal and the Democrats deepening support for corporations—his attempts at a legacy through talks with Iran went the way of Hillarycare. 

                  But it was “The Decider” and his crew of fools, rowing up the Euphrates without a map, who went out of their way to worsen relations with the Iranians.  In Decision Points, he admits to leaving the Iranian issue “unresolved.”  (Though, what resolution he ever sought escapes me.)  In 2000, Bush was no internationalist.  In that campaign, he showed little interest in Iran or Iraq; isolation and “realism” was his nostrum.  After the attacks, Bush snubbed the moderate President Khatami, a reformer who was attempting to modernize a regressing country.  Khatami had hoped to light a candle to pay his respect to the victims of the Sunni attack and was refused because Iran, Iraq, and Syria were seen by administration hawks as equivalent evils in the “war on terror.”

Crist rightly declares this as a lost opportunity for an alliance; by using the “natural divisions” within the region, better policy could have been crafted for the U.S. and the peoples of the Middle East.  (As Bush will undoubtedly claim credit for emerging economic growth in Iraq, this failure is notable.)  Instead, as Rumsfeld once famously noted in his famous “snowflake” memos, all was swept up “things related and not.”  Iran was denounced as totalitarian—though Washington’s own allies were no angels.  The opportunity of exploiting the narcissism of small differences dissolved.  The administration refused any consideration of Iran in a postwar role—despite the obvious Shia majority within Iraq.  And by 2006 over 140 soldiers were killed by Shia militias.  How much of this could have been prevented with foresight from Bush’s “Vulcans” and the most basic of diplomatic communication?  Iran had cooperated during the Gulf War—even helping evacuate hostages from annexed Kuwait.  Why was it so unthinkable now considering the overtures by Khatami and his own domestic reforms?   

                  By the time Obama reached the White House and offered to talk without precondition to Iran’s leaders, it seemed too late.  Years of suspicion and mutual distrust (as well as the brutal and erratic behavior of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) jammed negotiations.  The reckless behavior by the Basiji in 2009’s stolen election pushed the pro-American youth underground and discredited Iran’s leadership more than anytime since Khomeini needlessly prolonged the conflict with Iraq. 

Recently, Obama successfully cut off Iran and the two countries now wander towards possibilities:  Nuclear conflict, an Israeli strike during a post-election interregnum, or an underground earthquake that could devastate hidden nuclear material.  (These are some of the more lurid ones.)  But a protracted stalemate seems unlikely.  The strength of The Twilight War is Crist’s ability to illuminate the shadowy history; it illustrates the repeated incompetence of officials whose decisions have led us into the uncharted dark.  

Beirut: The Last Home Movie Review by Brett Warnke

            Destroyed cities are not anomaly in modern life.   In Indiana, I've worked in depopulated Gary and my father worked in ever-shrinking Detroit.  When I was in college, two planes attempted to destroy downtown New York.  And when I taught in New Orleans, the levees buckled and destroyed the school in which I began teaching my first English course.  "THAT A CITY could die; for a European, that is unthinkable," wrote BHL in American Vertigo.  But in the excellent 1987 documentary, "Beirut:  The Last Home Movie" we are able to watch a Fracophone-Lebanese family--the country's urban Christian elite--talk through their lives as gunfire snaps in the emptying city around them.                    
            Three sisters, one brother, and a mother are all that's left of the old money Bustros family of Lebanon.  The memory of the family matriarch, Evelyn Bustros, acts like a re-emerging specter.  A writer, painter, and social activist, Evelyn's portrait--with its unblinking coldness--stares out at the anxieties and crippling uncertainties of her successors.  Will the family sell the estate?  Will the family be run out of Lebanon?    
             Gaby is in her mid-thirties, a long-time New Yorker, wised-up but fragile and artistic.  Mouna, the eldest, is a lonely and self-described "egocentric."  She describes the end of her marriage (which occurred for no particular reason, save Mouna's coldness) and describes her love of "absolute" destruction.  Meanwhile, mother, Nyla, a quiet younger sister, and the youngest brother, Fady, play much lesser roles.
              The family talks and talks more, but nothing changes.  What the film succeeds in creating is a two-hour long exploration--alluded to in one frame--of a family stuck in a web of their own making.  The setting of this entrapment is a massive 18th century house, in some ways a psychic symbol in which all family-members live and squirm.  If the outside war reunited the family, the psychological irresolution they endure keeps them there, reflecting and examining their relationships and past.  The house, even when full of chain-smoking revelers, always seems empty.  Within the home are azure chandeliers, photographs, and all the quiet tedium and protection one would need, say, if a civil war is unraveling your country.
             There is no next in this movie, there is simply more.  The flashes of Beirut's destruction appear as blips, minor transitions in the narrative.  Could this film have been made elsewhere?  Perhaps, with an uptown family in New Orleans as the floodwaters rose.  There is then, an enduring truth of a detached elite, hidden in plain sight to an alien outside world.  A chaotic world with its internal rivalries and international sharks waiting to hungrily snatch the Lebanon's left-overs seems as far-away as the subway Gaby took to JFK.
              So what's at stake in this movie?  The well-being and future of the Bustros dynasty?  The future of Lebanon?  It's Christian elite?  While not a political movie, the Bustros' seem unaware of their own biases and social standing.  Gaby's mother wants to entertain and please, yet her reason for being has evaporated since her husband death and the destruction of her city.  What use is she in a world devoid of gossip, parties, and culture?  Servants and landscapers quietly do the family's bidding and any talk of the ferocious politics of the outside world is met with quiet and anxiety.  They are an entire family retreating into besieged self-reflection; an examination that is strange, arresting, and sad.

Beirut: The Last Home Movie

            Destroyed cities are not anomaly in modern life.   In Indiana, I've worked in depopulated Gary and my father worked in ever-shrinking Detroit.  When I was in college, two planes attempted to destroy downtown New York.  And when I taught in New Orleans, the levees buckled and destroyed the school in which I began teaching my first English course.  "THAT A CITY could die; for a European, that is unthinkable," wrote BHL in American Vertigo.  But in the excellent 1987 documentary, "Beirut:  The Last Home Movie" we are able to watch a Fracophone-Lebanese family--the country's urban Christian elite--talk through their lives as gunfire snaps as the film's soundtrack of a disintegrating city.                      
            Three sisters, one brother, and a mother are all that's left of the old money Bustros family of Lebanon.  The memory of the family matriarch, Evelyn Bustros, acts like a re-emerging specter.  A writer, painter, and social activist, Evelyn's portrait--with its unblinking coldness--stares out at the anxieties and crippling uncertainties of her successors.  Will the family sell the estate?  Will the family be run out of Lebanon?    
             Gaby is in her mid-thirties, a long-time New Yorker, wised-up but fragile and artistic.  Mouna, the eldest, is a lonely and self-described "egocentric."  She describes the end of her marriage (which occurred for no particular reason, save Mouna's coldness) and describes her love of "absolute" destruction.  Meanwhile, mother, Nyla, a quiet younger sister, and the youngest brother, Fady, play much lesser roles.
              The family talks and talks more, but nothing changes.  What the film succeeds in creating is a two-hour long exploration--alluded to in one frame--of a family stuck in a web of their own making.  The setting of this entrapment is a massive 18th century house, in some ways a psychic symbol in which all family-members live and squirm.  If the outside war reunited the family, the psychological irresolution they endure keeps them there, reflecting and examining their relationships and past.  The house, even when full of chain-smoking revelers, always seems empty.  Within the home are azure chandeliers, photographs, and all the quiet and tedium and protection one would need, say, if a civil war is unraveling your country.
             There is no next in this movie, there is simply more.  The flashes of Beirut's destruction appear as blips, minor transitions in the narrative.  Could this film have been made elsewhere?  Perhaps, with an uptown family in New Orleans as the floodwaters rose.  There is then, an enduring truth of a detached elite, hidden in plain sight to an alien outside world.  A chaotic world with its internal rivalries and international sharks waiting to hungrily snatch the Lebanon's left-overs seems as far-away as the subway Gaby took to JFK.
              So what's at stake in this movie?  The well-being and future of the Bustros dynasty?  The future of Lebanon?  It's Christian elite?  While not a political movie, the Bustros' seem unaware of their own biases and social standing.  Gaby's mother wants to entertain and please, yet her reason for being has evaporated since her husband death and the destruction of her city.  What use is she in a world devoid of gossip, parties, and culture?  Servants and landscapers quietly do the family's bidding and any talk of the ferocious politics of the outside world is met with quiet and anxiety.  They are an entire family retreating into besieged self-reflection; an examination that is strange, arresting, and sad.    

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.”