Meatlessness & American History By Murray Polner When I decided at age 17 not to eat meat or fish my alarmed mother asked our family doctor if I would die. Reassured I would live, I fed stray animals and birds and on occasional Saturdays visited the bookstore of Simon Gould, a Manhattan bookseller who had run for the presidency as a write-in candidate on a ticket called The Vegetarian Party. I doubt he received many votes but he was kind and once gave me a piece of advice. Best to remain a vegetarian for life for humane reasons, the better to resist future pressures to regress into eating meat. Health was important, but secondary to preserving all life.. He also presented me with a book published in 1892, Animal Rights, by Henry Salt, a British polymath. Peter Singer, who wrote the indispensable Animal Liberation said it “remains among my most treasured books.” The word vegetarian itself derives from the Latin “vigitore,” or “giving strength and health” but was more appropriately defined by the long-defunct American Vegetarian Society as “a diet free of flesh products produced by violence and suffering.” Vegetarianism, once derided and ignored is now accepted by millions of Americans, had its beginnings in Great Britain and was brought to the United States by the Bible Christian Church. Because it is rarely scrutinized seriously by historians, Adam D. Shprintzen’s illuminating study, The Vegetarian Crusade: The Rise of an American Reform Movement 1817-1921 (University of North Carolina Press) is more than welcome because it tells its fascinating if often eccentric history in the context of momentous societal changes. When the British-based Bible Christian Church members immigrated to Philadelphia in 1817 they came with the blessing of its founder William Cowherd, a good-looking Lancashire man and devotee of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish philosopher and theologian who preached the virtues of a meatless diet though there is some doubt that he was always faithful to the ideal. Cowherd remained behind in Britain but was said to have been the only man brave enough to read through the complete works of Swedenborg in Latin. When the 41 members of his Bible Christian Church arrived they were led by the Reverends William Metcalfe and James Clarke and were greeted or assailed as blasphemers. Undaunted and fired with the passion of Christian ardor, they had three indispensable doctrines: “temperance, pacifism, and a meatless diet.” In other words, “Thou Shalt Not Kill”—nor they added, drink alcohol. Radical they were and Metcalfe was never shy about proclaiming the faith. In Shprintzen’s words, “he equated meat consumption with violent, cruel tendencies, appealing to the most uncontrolled whims of human aggression.” Eating animals was to him a refutation of God. Metcalfe’s growing presence helped promote a vegetarian diet among believers and his sympathizers, notably the imposing Sylvester Graham, who had been working for the Temperance Union. Emerson dubbed him “the poet of bran bread and pumpkin”—a prophetic description of the man, and the diet he too fostered but unencumbered by Scripture. In time, vegetarians like Graham gradually shifted away from associating dietary reform with abolitionism, opposition to war, and women’s right to vote and its relationship with religious doctrine and serious societal changes were muted. Graham went even further than Metcalfe, blaming a 1832 cholera epidemic on the common diet of meat and whiskey though certainly urban overcrowding, slums, lack of adequate sanitation and filthy water were by far the main malefactors. In doing so, Graham moved beyond the limits of the Philadelphia church. It was Graham, for all his unconventional behavior and passion, who recognized that somehow, in someway, disease was relate to diet. And he didn't stop at the table. Morning calisthenics, a pleasant disposition and open bedroom windows were vital as were chastity and cold baths. By the time he died in 1885, he had deeply influenced the founding of the Vegetarian Society of America, the first national organization for meatless Americans. Shprintzen credits him for helping spread vegetarianism from “a small, localized religious movement focused on spiritual ascension to a growing community throughout the United States attached to the scientific and moral reform principles of Sylvester Graham.” His impact was certainly felt in the Alcott family. In the 1840s, Amos Bronson, Louisa May’s aloof, dreamy and visionary father, his cousin William, a school teacher and doctor, and an ascetic British disciple Charles Lane (who Louise May detested) tried to form a perfect utopian community fourteen miles from Cambridge, Massachusetts. They called it Fruitlands, the first home of an organized—however minuscule it was— vegetarian colony in the country. Bronson Alcott was well- known for his Library of Health, the principle journal advocating a meatless diet. Still, practical affairs were not his concern and Louisa May complained that her mother became the colony’s workhorse while her father, who was also involved with the transcendentalists, dreamed of a revived Garden of Eden. When Louisa wrote about her family’s very different sort of life she said, with a mixture of kindness and despair, that her father’s venture “was a failure. The world was not ready for utopia yet.” Fruitlands comprised a few derelict fruit orchards and a neat red frame farmhouse and never had more than eleven members at any one time, of which five were Alcotts. They banned coffee, tea, honey (forcibly taken from bees), cotton (harvested by slaves), leather and silk. When Fruitland collapsed Bronson was practical enough to move his family to Brook Farm, where he could take solace that, while not vegetarian, it had a “Graham Table” where the profane trinity of meat, tobacco and coffee were forbidden Yet another important 19th and 20th Century reformer was Henry Clubb, barely known to contemporary Americans. British-born, on his arrival he went to work for Horace Greeley’s anti-slavery New York Tribune, whose abolitionist views he consistently reflected. He too started a community of vegetarians but based on the Scriptures. In 1856, Clubb organized the ill-fated Vegetarian Emigration Company, with some one hundred vegetarian and antislavery members. The settlers were ridiculed by the Chicago Tribune as eastern spoiled reformers unfamiliar with the hardships of prairie life. Instead, what the region needed, the paper’s editorial writer wrote while ensconced in his Chicago office, were “beef-eating men,” strong, vital, men of action packing guns. The pioneers set out for the Kansas frontier two years after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which permitted white male citizens to decide if slavery should be allowed in their new states. Caught in the middle of raging gun battles and incredible cruelty, their sentiments always on the anti-slavery side, they struggled to succeed. According to Clubb, they did. But not according to a settler named Miriam Davis Colt, who in 1862 published her book Went to Kansas, a personal and decidedly negative account of her experiences living in Clubb’s community. Clubb never accepted her criticism and later enlisted in the Union army in the Civil War. That he, a spiritual pacifist, chose to enlist in the Quartermaster Corps, served four years, refused to carry a weapon and was wounded, was not too unusual to some of his followers given those bloody years. Others in his community also enlisted because like Clubb, they believed ending slavery was more important than their dedication to pacifism and vegetarianism. More significantly, perhaps, in an Otsego, Michigan, kitchen in 1863, Ellen Harmon (Sister) White threw herself onto the floor with a vision proclaiming "Glory, Glory.” A Millerite since her teens—in 1844 she had patiently waited on a Maine hillside for the Adventist William Miller’s predicted second coming of the Messiah—Ellen Harmon White revealed the sacred commandments that thereafter no Seventh Day Adventurist could eat meat, drink alcohol, use salt or engage in violence against animals or humans. It is today the third largest vegetarian religion in the world, behind Hinduism and Buddhism. By the time the Vegetarian Society of America closed its doors in 1921 (the year Henry Clubb, its president, died) vegetarians were hardly diffident about believing there was no need to kill for food, or as Shprintzen, editor of the Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington points out, there was “plenty to eat without any meat.” By then, the seeds of diet and health, animal rights, respect for the earth and concern for the purity of our food supply had been planted. Vegetarianism is not for everyone and meat eaters are neither amoral nor immoral, one no more or less ethically superior. Still, Shprintzen’s original and probing book offers many ideas for researchers and writers to explore. The field is wide open.

Hermann Goering, Dr. Douglas Kelley and Nuremberg By Murray Polner Since the 1930s scholars, scientists, journalists and ordinary folk have wondered why the Nazis could have committed so many ghastly crimes against innocent people and children. At times a few helpful insights arise from the killers themselves. One that comes to mind emerges from Gitta Sereny’s mesmerizing interviews with Franz Stangl, the Treblinka and Sobibor commandant, in her 1974 book Into That Darkness. Stangl was responsible for 900,000 deaths. Sereny came away thinking of him as a run of the mill bureaucratic careerist who saw victims as “cargo,” while doing personally fulfilling work that brought him prestige and promotions. After Germany’s defeat he escaped to Brazil where he was caught in 1967, extradited to West Germany, given a life sentence, and finally died of a heart attack in 19i71. More recently, Thomas Harding’s impressive Hanns and Rudolf deals with Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Hoess [spelled Hoss with an umlaut in German]. When tried for his crimes he told the court that he and others like him were not merely following orders, as most captured Nazis claimed, but instead their initiative was highly valued by their superiors and, he chillingly continued, he and his colleagues took great pride in their work. He was hung on the grounds of Auschwitz. Jack El-Hai, who wrote the well-received The Lobotomist, offers yet another perspective in this forceful and absorbing book, The Nazi and The Psychiatrist: Hermann Goring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fateful Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII (PublicAffairs). To find out if fifty-two elite imprisoned Nazi prisoners were fit for trial as war criminals, the U.S. Army assigned Capt. Douglas M. Kelley, a psychiatrist, to examine the prisoners, a posting he came to view as an extraordinary gift as he developed professional relationships with a few, but especially with Hermann Goering [spelled Goring with an umlaut in German], Reichmarschall, Luftwaffe chief and number three in Hitler’s circle. Among the more prominent Nazis held were Hans Frank, governor-general of Poland; Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy Fuhrer who had flown to England in May 1941 in a quixotic effort to being “peace” between the two nations; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, SS; Robert Ley, who ran labor affair; Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister; Julius Streicher, editor of the pornographic anti-Semitic newspaper Der Sturmer; Arthur Rosenberg, the party’s racial “philosopher”; Generals Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel; and Wilhelm Frick, Goebbels’ man. All this is well known. What is new in El-Hai’s book is how much Kelley learned about some of them, especially Goering, who he diagnosed as narcissistic, clever, dangerous and sly but also personable. Surprisingly, Goering had an anti-Nazi brother and unsurprisingly was apparently a loving husband and father. Julius Streicher, repugnant and degenerate, despised Goering for his pretensions and arrogance as did several other jailed Nazis, though they were probably surprised when he committed suicide in a Nuremberg cell with a cyanide capsule. El-Hai was able to locate and study the extensive notes and records Kelley took home with him after his discharge. His portraits of his other patients included the lesser known Swiss-born Dr. Leonardo Conti, M.D., who developed the euthanasia program to exterminate the aged and disabled and who encouraged experiments on concentration camp prisoners. He escaped the hangman’s noose by strangling himself, leaving behind a note expressing remorse for not having bid farewell to his family. Kaltenbrunner, the highest ranking SS official in custody was, wrote Kelly, a coward, “a typical bully, tough and arrogant when in power, a cheap craven in defeat, unable to even stand the pressure of prison life.” Robert Ley, who Kelley believed to be certifiably mad, also committed suicide in his cell. When Kelley’s military time was up he was replaced by another psychiatrist Gustave Gilbert, who had some different ideas about his patient-prisoners, viewing them from a greater emotional and medical distance. Still, both men tried to unravel the mystery of what made Nazi leaders do what they did and why. El-Hai’s chapter on “The Nazi Mind” summarizes the various theories they held and forms the centerpiece of the book. To Kelley, there was no single Nazi personality. Amoral and self-absorbed, they spent their working days “behind big desks, deciding big affairs as businessmen, politicians, and racketeers.” Conducting Third Reich affairs. Following orders. Innovating. Getting the job done. Being rewarded. Even so, since Kelley could offer no serious psychiatric confirmation of a common “Nazi Mind” he retreated into the German past to understand what if anything was unique to Germany that allowed such creatures to capture and rule the nation. Otherwise, the prisoners were “normal men” who worked very hard, and then returned home to their wives and kids. If they had a common mantra it was that ends not means mattered. Other than Ley, "there wasn’t an insane Joe in the crowd,” Kelley once told The New Yorker. You could find their types everywhere, even in America, he repeatedly warned, worried that even America was capable of breeding similar brutes. As if in confirmation, Gilbert’s 1947 Nuremberg Diary quotes Goering telling him during the Nuremberg trial, “people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger, It works the same way in any country,” a belief Kelley grew to share. “It can happen here,” he repeated over and again, even fearing the possible rise of a totalitarian state. In 1947 he told an Anti - Defamation League audience that he wished all politicians and statesmen could be psychologically examined before assuming office, pointing especially to southern bigoted politicians. While the prisoners sat in their cells, questions arose among outsiders about the best reading of the Rorschach tests the two psychiatrists had administered them. There were those who approved of Kelley’s conclusion that no distinguishing “Nazi mind” existed. None of the prisoners were moral, he argued, but were instead psychopaths, with treacherous characteristics, much like Goering’s. Gilbert and others believed the Nazi leaders shared commonalities of mental disease but saw the Nazis having flourished in a distinctive political environment and historical past to win a key election in 1933 and then crush all opposition and retain absolute power for twelve years. Both men wrote books (Kelley’s was 22 Cells in Nuremberg) arguing their cases. El-Hai speculates that the crucial difference between the two “was that Gilbert’s offered an explanation that self-righteous and victorious Americans wanted to hear. It caught the mood.” El-Hai’s makes sense when he explains that “Until someone else refutes it, the latest study suggests that the Nazi personality that eluded Kelley, seduced Gilbert, and tempted so many other researchers is a myth. In Nuremberg, the defendants sought to assert their innocence. Exasperated and outraged, Chief Justice Robert Jackson finally had heard enough and spoke out to the defendants and their lawyers: “If you were to say of these men that they were not guilty, it would be as though to say there has been no war, there were no slain, there has been no crime.” After 218 days three defendants were acquitted, seven given prison sentences and Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Arthur Rosenberg, Julius Streicher, Alfred Jodl, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Fritz Sauckel (the lesser known head of the slave workers empire) were hanged, their bodies taken to the Dachau ovens and their remains dumped into a nearby river to prevent future neo-Nazi memorials and parades. In an anti-climax El-Hai relates Kelley’s stormy and intellectually restless postwar life, which ended up by his taking a leaf from Goering and swallowing a cyanide pill.

What IF? By Murray Polner “I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot” President Obama said at a recent press conference, suggesting perhaps that the leaker should have taken the legal route and faced the threat of punishment, presumably like Thoreau, Gandhi and King. Aside from defining who is and isn’t a patriot, it’s a pleasant sentiment, echoing the three saints of civil disobedience and now by Thomas Friedman, the Times’ eternal sermonizer- in-residence who urged Snowden to come home and prove he is a whistleblower and not a “traitor,” ignoring for the moment his misinterpretation of the constitutional definition of treason as defined in Article 3 Section 3, which would not implicate Snowden. Quitting Putin’s authoritarian Russia and returning home to face the music “would mean,” Friedman warned, “risking a lengthy jail term, but also trusting the fair-mindedness of the American people, who, I believe, will not allow an authentic whistle-blower to be unfairly punished.” Tell that to eight whistle-blowers indicted by the Obama administration for allegedly violating the 1917 Espionage Act, a loathsome law enacted by a bigoted Wilson administration, which was designed to protect America from real and imagined Reds, IWW rebels, and infuriating iconoclasts who refused to be drafted for a war between European empires. Perhaps Friedman needs to take some time off from his perpetual global wanderings and schedule some interviews with our latest Espionage Act indictees Thomas Drake, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, James Hitselberger, Shami K. Leibowitz, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling, and of course Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning and hear how they view the “fair-mindedness of the American people.” Put another way, now that the Manning trial is coming to an end, and Snowden will probably not be coming home soon to confront all our leading thinkers and important people in Washington who have already convicted him, a question must be posed: What if a Manning-Snowden type had been around when Bush, Cheney and all their neocon propagandists and sycophantic pundits were shouting wolf about Saddam’s WMDs and instead revealed that what they were promoting was untrue? So who did the actual damage? Pfc. Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden, or all those commanding, controlling and unaccountable liars who forced an Iraq War on us? Had such a blessed whistleblower existed then he or she might have saved tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqi lives. -

“What harm did he do Thee, O Lord?” By Murray Polner Adam Hochschild’s haunting yet illuminating assessment of World War I (mainly concentrating on Great Britain) To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 is a welcome addition to the vast historical and literary output of that pointless war in that it is different, at least to an American reader. By no means a detailed if conventional history of battles and strategies and politicians, it is, firstly, a powerful condemnation of a war that should never have been fought. The battle at Passchendaele (officially, the Third Battle of Ypres) cost the lives of at least 300,000 men. Hochschild rightly calls it “a blatant, needless massacre initiated by generals with a near-criminal disregard for the conditions men faced.” In northern Italy, German and Austrian armies at Caporetto caused more than 500,000 Italian casualties -- dead, wounded or captured. On the eastern front the Russian armies, its generals and government corrupt and incompetent, were effectively defeated a year or so after the Romanovs entered the war. What makes To End All Wars so original (mirroring to some extent Paul Fussell’s memorable 1975 book The Great War and Modern Memory) is that Hochschild also eloquently tells the story of courageous and principled Britons -- and to a lesser degree the French Socialist leader Jean Jaures, who opposed French entry into the war and was murdered by a right wing assassin. Though he certainly praises the great anti- war soldier- poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen (a combat lieutenant whose parents were told of his death in France the day the Armistice was signed) it also looks sympathetically at those who chose to volunteer or accept conscription “for whom the magnetic attraction of combat, or at least the belief that it was patriotic and necessary, proved so much stronger than human revulsion at mass death or any perception that, win or lose, this was a war that would change the world for the worse.” And indeed it did. The war was an abattoir, a charnel house consuming millions of soldiers, volunteers, reservists and draftees. Poison gas (chlorine) and mustard gas were used as were tanks and aerial bombings. It was much like WWII and subsequent wars, large and small, laboratories for industrial warfare and the “prostitution of science for purposes of sheer destruction” as the conservative Lord Lansdowne, former viceroy of India and secretary for war in the Lloyd-George cabinet, presciently put it in a letter to the pro-war Times of London --which refused to publish it. The war, writes Hochschild, author of the brilliant King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, “forever shattered the self-assured sunlit Europe of hussars and dragoons in plumed helmets and emperors waving from open horse drawn carriages.” It was too a global war maintained by European empires -- three of whom would disintegrate and whose blood-spattered conclusion led to upheavals throughout Europe by many who had once cheered for the men they sent to fight. Among the conscripts were my uncle and father both drafted into the Russian army, my uncle eventually taken prisoner by the Austro-Hungarians and my father deserting after the Tsar’s abdication, captured by a White army and pressed into service, and finally deserting once more. Today, there are some two hundred British WWI cemeteries in Belgium and France alone, (separate graveyards contain the remains of Senegalese soldiers and Chinese laborers, “reminders of how far men traveled to die”), many containing only pieces of bodies while some remains have never been identified. The war touched all classes in Britain. Five grandsons of former Prime Minister Lord Salisbury were killed as were the eldest son of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and the two sons of the future PM, Bonar Law. In Germany, Chancellor Theobold von Bethmann-Hollweg lost his eldest son. John Kipling, whose father Rudyard, was a zealous supporter of the war (like John Buchan, John Galsworthy, Arthur Conan Doyle, Emmaline and Christabel Pankhurst, former suffragettes, and of course Winston Churchill) until his 18 year old son John was killed in battle and suddenly the deeply aggrieved father, the perennial flag waver who never served in the military, composed an “enigmatic” (to Hochschild, but not to me) couplet in his “Epitaphs of the War”: If any question why we died Tell them because our fathers lied Georges Duhamel, a front-line doctor, reflected on what he – unlike Rudyard Kipling and other living room warriors -- had lived through. In his 1919 memoir The Life of Martyrs and Civilization, 1914-1917 he wrote about his experiences in anger, declaring, “I hate the twentieth century as I hate rotten Europe and the whole world…” Hochschild adds a long forgotten chapter of WWI to the 20,000 Britons who declared themselves to be Conscientious Objectors. Many chose alternative service but 6000 British men were imprisoned rather than serve the war in any way. A few were sentenced to death, but never executed. The pacifist Charlotte Despard, whose brother General Sir John French commanded British forces in France until forced out by the equally incompetent and politically-connected General Sir Douglas Haig, wrote and demonstrated against the war. Sylvia Pankhurst turned pacifist while her mother Emmaline and sister Christobel became fervent home front warriors. Keir Hardie, labor leader and socialist, regularly and publicly opposed the war. Perhaps most prominently, Bertrand Russell, the mathematician and antiwar crusader, refused to believe the warmakers and their propagandists’ lies, for which he was briefly imprisoned. Indeed, the British Government tried very hard to silence opponents of the war, using Scotland Yard and its director Basil Thomson to pursue antiwar people– much like the U.S. used the venal Edgar Hoover’s FBI during the Vietnam War, a war Russell also publicly opposed. Not until 1919 were all British COs released from prison. (In the U.S. the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was imprisoned by the Woodrow Wilson Administration because he opposed conscription and the war, and was not released until 1920 after the much-maligned Warren Harding became president) Not until 2006, following a campaign organized by a citizen’s group “Shot at Dawn” did the British finally pardon more than 300 soldiers executed during WWI. The Allies were rescued by the arrival of fresh U.S. troops. Within a year or so it was all over. According to a conservative count by the U.S. War Department in 1924 over 8.5 million soldiers died in WWI and more than 21 million were wounded, including hundreds of thousands who lost their limbs, eyesight and hearing while an astonishing number were badly shell shocked.. Hochschild movingly notes an epitaph placed by a mother and father on their son’s grave at Gallipoli: “What harm did he do Thee, O Lord?” In 1919, the Allies, having won a pyrrhic victory, forced Germany to sign a punitive treaty that declared themselves solely to blame for the war, thus virtually assuring another war. For antiwar people, Hochschild concludes, their struggle against mass industrialized violence “remains to be fought again—and again.” Murray Polner wrote No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and co-edited and wrote, with Thomas E. Woods, Jr., We Who Dared To Say No To War and other books. He is a book review editor for George Mason University’s History News Network.org.

Al Campanis’s Exile from Baseball: Was Justice Done? By Murray Polner I often think of Al Campanis, a true baseball old-timer I knew, who was drummed out of the game he so loved in 1987 because of his foolish remark on “Nightline” TV about black players lacking “the necessities” to be managers or front office people. He’d been a Montreal Royal shortstop in 1946 playing alongside Jackie Robinson at second base, barnstormed off-season with a racially integrated squad, a Brooklyn Dodger scout who unearthed Roberto Clemente and Sandy Kourfax, and who reached the apex of his profession as General Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers and took them to four pennants and one World Series title. He even prevented a former black Dodger from killing himself. And then he was suddenly, abruptly, unexpectedly, and permanently blacklisted. In late 1987 or early 1988 Al Campanis phoned. Out of a job since that TV performance, he asked if I would help him write his autobiography. He had come to me, he said, because I’d written a biography of his former mentor and boss Branch Rickey. The next week I drove up the coast from Laguna Hills to Fullerton in Orange County in southern California where Al and his wife lived in a modest suburban home not far from Angels Stadium. Born out of wedlock in 1916 in Kos, part of the Dodecanese Islands (once part of Italy but returned to Greece in 1947) Campanis and his mother arrived in the U.S. when he was six. He graduated New York University, played football there though loved baseball more, and then joined the Navy. Once discharged, began playing minor league baseball. On at least a four or five occasions I drove north to Fullerton, where Al and other expatriate former Brooklyn Dodgers had moved in 1957 when Walter O’Malley kidnapped the team and moved to L.A. (As the hoary joke among unrequited Brooklyn fans went and still goes, a diehard Brooklyn fan walks into a bar with a gun and sees Hitler, Stalin and O’Malley. Guess who he shoots?). We talked and talked, drank coffee, ate sandwiches and sat around his comfortable but hardly luxurious kitchen, his wife always gone for the day. He was about 71, tall, agile, a still-vigorous if aging athlete with a commanding tone. A man accustomed to lead, or so I thought when I first met him. He spoke quietly of his past, how Rickey taught him to evaluate baseball players and the skills needed to build a successful ballclub. He was especially proud of a small book he had composed detailing what he had learned and practiced, Dodger Way to Play Baseball, and he autographed a copy for me. Looking back, I felt like a junior reporter, pleased to be treated as an equal, a feeling which gradually left me the more we met and talked. I could see the man was badly hurt. On other days he was more relaxed, warmer, less interested in impressing me. He wanted an honest book, he said, one that told his life story good and bad. He proudly spoke of players, some black, he had treated fairly and honorably, like Roy Campanella and of course Robinson, who he taught various infield skills while playing together for the Dodger’s top farm club Montreal in the International League. And he spoke of how a deeply depressed John Roseboro, once a star catcher for the Dodgers, tried to commit suicide in his office when Campanis persuaded him to drop his gun. It was as if he was asking, desperately. how can anyone call me a racist bigot? He was unhappy and wounded, profoundly regretful, and thoroughly crushed. “Even prisoners get parole or probation, don’t they?” he blurted out one day, managing a feeble smile. What was most difficult for him was that he had mindlessly squandered what he treasured most in life: authority, companionship, responsibility, The seasonal Chase. He told me that soon after the “Nightline” debacle he said he appealed to Rachel Robinson for advice and she wisely, compassionately, told him, “Forget it, Al. Move on with your life.” Throughout our meetings, he always went back to that late- night TV show in the Houston Astrodome, where he expected to join Don Newcombe, the black ex- pitcher-- who never appeared because his flight had been cancelled because of bad weather-- Roger Kahn of Boys of Summer fame, and Rachel Robinson to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the significance of her husband’s coming. While he was waiting, he told me over and again, he kept staring into the dark screen of a camera, far from the producer in New York and interviewer Ted Koppel in Maryland. And then it came: Koppel finally lobbed him a soft ball asking why there were virtually no black managers, front office executives, or owners, and whether racial bias was widespread in baseball. His convoluted answer would follow him into his grave. “No, I don’t believe it’s prejudice. I truly believe that they may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or perhaps a general manager.” Al tried to explain to me how he only intended to refer to their lack of experience. But managers have been employed without experience and some teams preferred hiring from an all-white, old boys list of pals. Nor did he consider the power of wealthy white owners, “Jock sniffers” in Robert Lipsyte felicitous phrase, who have often inherited or married into money and power. He was certainly unaware of what Rev. Billy Kyles, a close ally of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., meant when he told Tim Wendel in Summer of ‘68 that King and his best friends closely watched sports with “an historical eye.” In our final meeting he told me he was initially blindsided by the question and become confused and unable to respond sensibly. No, he hadn’t been drinking though he may have been feeling sickly. And no, Ted Koppel had not been unfair. In parting, I left believing that despite his foolish remark he was a good and honorable man who had been badly treated by the unforgiving world of professional baseball and our myopic moral guardians. For saying what he did he had to resign and would never again be hired to run a baseball team (nor, for that matter, would the brainy, courageous Robinson after he retired) despite accolades from black players, managers and others who knew him. Dusty Baker, African American manager and former Dodger outfielder, said, "You hate that any man's career is ruined in a couple of minutes. What he said was wrong, but he was always cool to minorities when I was there, especially the Latin players, and the blacks.” Harry Edwards, a sociologist at Berkeley and a civil rights activist who was taken on by baseball to help develop ways of adding more minorities to leadership roles, worked with Campanis after “Nightline.” On ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” documentary he explained, “It wasn’t a simple case of Al being a bigot—to say he was just a bigot is simply wrong—people are more complex than that. To a certain extent, it was the culture Al was involved with. To a certain extent, it was a comfort with that culture. And at another level, it was a form of discourse he was embedded in.” It’s an old American temptation. Punish the words, not the deeds. Don Imus, Andy Rooney, Jesse Jackson and Rush Limbaugh spring to mind. Some like Imus and Rooney didn’t suffer too much and managed to recover. Jesse Jackson and his “Hymietown” remark faded and he’s carried on in Washington. Rush Limbaugh lost lots of advertisers (temporarily) while keeping his many radio outlets and millions of loyal fans. And according to Larry Elder in Jewish World Review, even Harry Truman once called New York “Kiketown” in his correspondence. Richard Nixon couldn’t stand Jews – except, maybe, Henry Kissinger-- and told his tape recorder all about it, but he survived his foul mouth and anti-Semitism—Watergate and his resignation is another matter. So I ask fifteen years after his death: Should Campanis have been pilloried and permanently blacklisted for one blunder? Or did liberal white fear of being branded bigots allow groupthink to take over? In 1987, five managers and eight general managers or team presidents were hired, none of them black. Someone had to shoulder the blame for institutionalized racism. Al Campanis was the perfect scapegoat. Al Campanis died in 1998, but his life was over in 1987. His punishment never fit the crime. He should have been suspended and then allowed to return to work. Baseball owes him a belated apology. His autobiography was never written. Murray Polner wrote Branch Rickey: A Biography

War Crimes By Murray Polner Not since Harrison Salisbury’s book The 900 Days, appeared in 1969, has an English language book devoted to the German siege of Leningrad (now renamed St. Petersburg) appeared. The longest blockade in recorded history, it consumed 1.5 million people, half of them civilians, many of them children. In merciless, unvarnished detail Anna Reid’s Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War I, 1941-1944 (Walker) is filled with searing images of starvation, cannibalism, corruption and death in the most westernized and striking of Russian cities. The siege has essentially been overlooked in the West. But then, too, we’ve ignored the enormous sacrifices of the Russian people and its military forces in defeating Nazi Germany and its allies. Reid is a onetime Ukraine correspondent for the Economist and Daily Telegraph journalist who holds an advanced degree in Russian studies. The heart of her book are the memoirs, archives, letters and diaries of people who lived through the siege. Her heartbreaking and angry version does not spare the vicious German invaders though she rightly excoriates the Communist regime for waging a reign of terror against the city’s imaginary dissenters. Trapped Leningraders would in time turn livid at the sight of well-fed Party bureaucrats while the rest were starving, Reid is on target in wondering why sufficient food supplies were not stocked before and after the Germans invaded. She also faults Party officials for failing to order a general evacuation until it was far too late. While admittedly difficult to measure public opinion, Reid’s reading of the diaries and memoirs “show Leningraders raging as much against the incompetence, callousness, hypocrisy and dishonesty of their own officials as against the distant, impersonal enemy.” Yet Stalin’s purges and punishments never ceased. The NKVD and two of his closest henchmen, Andrei Zhdanov (who once denigrated the great Leningrad poet Anna Akhmatova as “a cross between a nun and whore”) and Georgi Malenkov (who would become one of Stalin’s successors after the dictator’s death in March 1953 and then just as abruptly be removed and sent, or so it is said, to Siberia for an alleged offense) carried out a reign of fear aimed at domestic “enemies.” Reid cites a Leningrad NKVD study citing the sort of people punished, among them supposed anarchists, Trotskyists, kulaks, tsarist sympathizers, the rich, and of course, Jews. She offers a devastating portrait of one roundup of people awaiting banishment. According to an eyewitness, Lyubov Shaporina. “…about a hundred people waited to be exiled. They were mostly old women… These are the enemies our government is capable of fighting… The Germans are at the gates, the Germans are about to enter the city, and we are arresting and deporting old women—lonely, defenseless, harmless people.” Reid’s book is filled with similar examples. The popular poet Olga Berggolt’s doctor father had, she wrote, loyally served the Soviet Union since the post-WWI civil war, but was dispatched, emaciated, to Krasnoyarsk in western Siberia because, Reid speculates, he was Jewish and refused to spy on his colleagues. Even party officials were not immune and their personal conflicts resembled a Mafia shootout with the persecutors turning on one another during the darkest days of the siege. Most notably, Malenkov tried to eliminate his rival Zhdanov but Stalin spared his sycophant. Everyday Leningraders were not as lucky while Malenkov, who survived his fight with Zhdanov, and Vyachaslav Molotov, (he who disillusioned many Communist party members throughout the world in 1939 when he brushed off the Soviet-Nazi Non-Aggression Pact by saying, “Fascism is a matter of taste”) began yet more arrests and deportations of “suspects” inside the city. While Reid dwells on Soviet crimes and ineptitude, she also turns toward the Germans, who after all, were the primary cause of the city’s misery. After they captured nearby Pavlovsky and Pushkin, a “fiercely anti-Bolshevik” diarist Olga Osipova, initially believed that, compared to the Communists, Hitler and the Nazis were not so bad. But she quickly learned “that the Nazis were different” after seeing them in action. All of Pushkin’s Jews were executed. Another memorist, the composer Bogdanov-Berezovsky, met a former neighbor who described countless examples of hangings and shootings of Jewish civilians in surrounding regions. In the end, Reid argues, “the war was won at unnecessarily huge cost. Of this the blockade of Leningrad is perhaps the most extreme example….Had Russia had different leaders she might have prepared for the siege better, prevented the Germans from surrounding the city at all, or, indeed, never have been invaded in the first place.” Eventually the siege ended and a few years later the war ended. More than twenty million Russians were dead. Leningraders and in fact many Russians looked forward to a change in direction since “Having fought, worked and suffered for their country for four years, they felt they had earned the right to be trusted by its government. They longed for the ordinary decencies of civilized life.” It was not to be and the repression continued unabated. 4.5 million Soviet troops were captured by the Germans and only 1.8 million emerged alive, the rest, especially Jews and Party members, were executed by their captors. POW returnees were often punished by a government which suspected then of betraying the Party. Lev Kopelov, a Red Army soldier, publicly objected to the mass rapes of German and Polish women, and was sent to a Gulag until 1954, the year after Stalin finally departed this earth. The oppression that followed rivaled the darkest years of the thirties when leading communists, generals and intellectuals were put to death. At its simplest, most absurd level, French bread was renamed Moscow bread, echoed in 2003 by American pseudo-patriots’ transforming French Fries into Freedom Fries after France objected to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And Soviet propagandists insisted that baseball was really a Russian invention. Far more seriously, terrified colleagues informed on one another and the camps once again began filling up. Jews again bore the brunt of the regime's vindictiveness. Molotov’s Jewish wife was falsely accused of being a Zionist and advocate of group sex and was sent to a camp, after which her husband, ever faithful to the Party and personal survival, divorced her. Not until Stalin died did the terror begin to subside, yet paradoxically millions of Russians publicly grieved for their brutal Georgian leader though just as many millions were silently thankful that he was finally gone.

Emma & Sasha By Murray Polner Years ago Paul Avrich, my high school classmate and later a colleague in a college where he was a professor and I an adjunct, invited me to spend an evening with an aging group of Jewish anarchists. At the gathering a woman told me that other than Eleanor Roosevelt the country’s most remarkable woman had been Emma Goldman. Ahrne Thorne agreed. He was the last editor of the anarchist “Freie Arbeiter Shtimme” (Free Worker’s Voice, it was closed in 1977 after 87 years of publication when it had 1700 subscribers). He said he had met Alexander Berkman and knew Emma Goldman well. It was hard for me to imagine these elderly men and women as threats to the Republic. They were also despised by Communists because anarchists had the temerity to reject their Soviet paradise. These old men and women had devoted their lives to an unachievable, impractical utopia where governments would play minimal roles and be supplanted by voluntary communes or as an old anarchist tune went, “there is no supreme savior, neither god nor king nor leader.” On that long ago evening they reminisced about strikes, picket lines, prison terms and battles against an oppressive American state as well as Soviet Russia, which had betrayed their long sought for “revolution.” The names of Goldman and her occasional lover and lifelong friend Berkman, known as Sasha, were lovingly recalled. “Red” Emma as her critics called her, loved America but was deported and died in exile in Canada. Ironically, her family needed governmental permission for her body to be returned and buried in the same Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago as the executed late 19th Century Haymarket Affair anarchists. Sasha, seriously ill, committed suicide in France and was buried there. The lives of these two rebels and the saga of American anarchism is the subject of “Sasha and Emma,” an engrossing dual biography. We are fortunate that the historian Paul Avrich, our most eminent scholar of American anarchism who wrote histories of the Haymarket affair, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the invaluable “Anarchist Voices” and “Anarchist Portraits” interviewed a wide assortment of surviving anarchists. Before he died he handed his copious notes to his daughter Karen and asked her to complete this book, which can stand alongside Alice Wexler and Candace Falk’s biographies about Goldman. A special virtue of this book is that it deals as well with Berkman, whose life has never before been the subject of a full-scale biography. Sasha was born in 1870 into a prosperous Jewish merchant family in Vilnius, Lithuania, then a part of the Russian Empire. Goldman, born in 1869 to a poor Jewish family in 1869 Kovno, also in Russian Lithuania, immigrated at 16 to Rochester, N.Y., and worked as a seamstress in that city’s garment factories. They met in 1889 in a coffee shop on the Lower East Side in Manhattan and remained the closest of friends and allies for the remainder of their lives. Americans have always feared and despised anarchists –real and imagined-- and occasionally with good reason. Sasha Berkman, an early devotee of “propaganda by deed” – assassination—was indirectly influenced by the heavy hand of autocratic Tsarist Russia and its anarchist and nihilist enemies who believed that Romanov despotism was best relieved by violence. Most famously, the Narodnya Volya or People’s Will group murdered the "reformer” Tsar Alexander II in 1881 (he had abolished serfdom in 1861 and established the Zemstvos or local self-governing councils). As luck would have it, his successor proved far harsher. Sasha arrived in the U.S. at age 18. The late 19th and early 20th Century was a bitter era of class conflict between unions and corporations and their governmental defenders. Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills in Homestead, Pennsylvania, were managed by Henry Clay Frick, who battled the striking Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers with Pinkertons and the National Guard. It was Sasha’s fury at what had happened in Homestead that moved him to enter Frick’s office in 1892 with a gun and dagger and try—unsuccessfully--- to kill Frick. Many Homestead strikers rejected Berkman’s act as did many anarchists. Karen Avrich points to the MIT-educated anarchist Benjamin Tucker, editor of “Liberty,” who wrote, “The hope of humanity lies in the avoidance of that revolution by force which the Berkmans are trying to precipitate.” It was this resort to violence from which anarchism would never recover and became cautionary lessons for socialist and liberal reformers. Berkman’s eighteen years in prison proved beneficial in one regard. After his release he wrote a trenchant revelation of prison life and the treatment of prisoners in “Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist,” a biting description of the brutality and corruption of prison life rarely heard since Dorothea Dix, the great prison and mental health reformer of the 19th Century had condemned conditions inside prisons and mental institutions. All the same, sporadic individual and state violence never ceased. The assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 by Leon Czolgosz, the son of Polish immigrants and a mentally unstable anarchist acting on his own, alarmed and infuriated millions. It wasn’t the first or last murder of a president but it proved to be yet another devastating blow against anarchists who were unfairly blamed for the killing. Many of their publications were shut down and their right to speak drastically curtailed, especially following the 1914 Ludlow Massacre in Colorado, when the Rockefeller-owned Fuel and Iron Company fought the strikers “many of them immigrants from Greece and Italy,” comments Karen Avrich, [who] “were demanding appropriate safety precautions, eight-hour workdays, cash wages rather than scrip, and the freedom to organize—all rights to which they were entitled under existing Colorado law`.” Disregarding the law, the company hired Pinkertons and brought in the National Guard who ended up killing miner wives and children. Emma fumed at the Ludlow killings. “This is no time for theorizing,” she heatedly wrote in her magazine ‘Mother Earth.” “With machine guns trained upon the strikers, the best answer is—dynamite.” Carlo Tresca, the Italian-born anarchist and IWW leader” who scorned the Mafia, Nazism and Communism, joined the protest. (Tresca was assassinated in Manhattan in 1943, some say by the Mafia and others think it was the NKVD). And while a scheme to assassinate Rockefeller was aborted the memory of Ludlow left the tycoon the most hated man in the country, which he remedied a decade later by following the advice of a shrewd public relations man who convinced him to donate enormous sums to all Americans. Berkman, like Goldman, a prolific writer, once tried to explain that anarchism was more than violence, a difficult stance given his past. “It is not bombs, disorder or chaos,” he wrote in his 1929 book “What Is Communist Anarchism” (also titled in other editions “Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism”): “It is not robbery and murder. It is not a war of each against all.” What it is, he explained, is “you should be free to do the things you want to do; and that you should not be compelled to do what you don’t want to do,” sounding a good deal like many 21st Century Americans. It was their article of faith. “Mother Earth” was founded in 1906 and Sasha began his own magazine in San Francisco, “The Blast,” where he led the fight to free Tom Mooney and Warren Billings who had been falsely judged guilty for a 1916 bombing in San Francisco during the city’s Preparedness Parade, “a massive event staffed by the city of San Francisco to demonstrate America’s readiness for war,” wrote Karen Avrich. Sasha’s magazine charged the effort to blame the attack on the two anarchists was nothing more than a replay of Haymarket when five anarchists were hung in 1887. after serving two weeks in jail for advocating birth control and distributing contraceptives Emma arrived in San Francisco delivered a public talk: “Preparedness : The Road to Universal Slaughter.” Sasha followed up in “The Blast”: “The enemy is athirst for blood.” With American entry into WWI, Woodrow Wilson, no friend of domestic dissenters, signed the Espionage Act in 1917 (still in effect!) and jailed the socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs, calling him ”a traitor to his country” for daring to oppose the war and conscription. Sasha and Emma were both shocked when Prince Peter Kropotkin, the most revered anarcho-pacifist since Tolstoy, supported the Allied war effort. Sasha and Emma, however, did not, denouncing the war and the draft and were subsequently deported along with 247 anarchists and IWW members. Mollie Steimer, a fellow anarchist and ally was also jailed for opposing U.S. military intervention in Archangel and Murmansk and Siberia against Russia and deported in 1923 to Soviet Russia where she soon became disenchanted and then moved to Mexico where she spent the remainder of her life before dying in 1980. In the new Russia Emma and Sasha observed Communists cracking down on critics (Trotsky called for an “end to factionalism” at the Communist Party’s 10th national conference and Lenin and Trotsky attacked and sought to punish Tolstoyan pacifists—“those who were still alive, shrewdly notes Karen Avrich, "many of their brethren had been shot during the civil war for refusing to serve in the Red Army and\ were imprisoned or exiled.” The Communist killed some 10,000 Kronstadt sailors who in 1921 had the effrontery to demand the right to elect their own representatives to the Kronstadt soviet. The two were shocked and appalled and just as Rosa Luxemburg, the memorable antiwar German leftwing socialist had done, they denounced Communist rule. Sasha, Karen Avrich writes, saw the carnage at Kronstadt as “the greatest crime committed by the soviet government against the Revolution and Russia, symbolizing the beginning of a new tyranny.” In 1922 Emma’s book “My Disillusionment in Russia” appeared (She was unhappy with Doubleday, Page, the publisher, we are told, for eliminating her last chapters which, she angrily insisted, “ was sure to convey to the reader that it was the Revolution that had disillusioned me rather than the pseudo-revolutionary methods of the Communist State.” Sasha also added his expose in “The Bolshevik Myth.” Outside the U.S. the two survived the repressive Red Scare of the twenties and they both wrote extensively in support of Sacco and Vanzetti. Emma visited the anti-fascist and anarchist militias during the Spanish Civil War and spent time in England publicizing the anti-Franco cause. Karen Avrich, however, says little how the Communists—answering to Moscow—were eager to control a post-civil war Spain and battled the anarchists during the war. Sasha, meanwhile, began warning about the dangers of fascism and Nazism as well as the similarities between Hitler and Stalin. To some extent anarchism has influenced people like Randolph Bourne, whose phrase “War is the Health of the State” became a truism among leftwing and libertarian antiwar activists, Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement. Howard Zinn, the Berrigan brothers, Paul Goodman. Murray Bookchin, Dwight McDonald, Karl Hess and the young rebels of the ‘60s and ‘70’s. Still, as Vivian Gornick astutely argues in her 2011 book “Emma Goldman” anarchism then and now is not identical. Anarchism then was “a serious element in a worldwide movement for political revolution.” Anarchism, in the later times--and even among disparate groups today -- “was a posture, an attitude, a way of protesting the transgression of democracy that most rebels wanted to see made more perfect.” While “Sasha and Emma” occasionally borders on hagiography and only slightly touches on their missteps, it is a clear-eyed and impressive demonstration how even the worthiest of goals cannot be achieved by tainted means. The true legacy of Sasha Berkman and Emma Goldman today is best epitomized by resistance to continuous wars, corporate dominance, religious authoritarianism, entrenched racism and the defense of freedom of expression and liberty, most notably their insistence that people are not mere automatons.