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RADICALISM IN AMERICA’S “INDUSTRIAL JUNGLE”: METAPHORS OF THE PRIMITIVE AND THE INDUSTRIAL IN ACTIVIST TEXTS Ursula McTaggart Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy In the Departments of English and American Studies Indiana University June 2008 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Doctoral Committee ________________________________ Purnima Bose, Co-Chairperson ________________________________ Margo Crawford, Co-Chairperson ________________________________ DeWitt Kilgore ________________________________ Robert Terrill June 18, 2008 ii © 2008 Ursula McTaggart ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A host of people have helped make this dissertation possible. My primary thanks go to Purnima Bose and Margo Crawford, who directed the project, offering constant support and invaluable advice. They have been mentors as well as friends throughout this process. Margo’s enthusiasm and brilliant ideas have buoyed my excitement and confidence about the project, while Purnima’s detailed, pragmatic advice has kept it historically grounded, well documented, and on time! Readers De Witt Kilgore and Robert Terrill also provided insight and commentary that have helped shape the final product. In addition, Purnima Bose’s dissertation group of fellow graduate students Anne Delgado, Chia-Li Kao, Laila Amine, and Karen Dillon has stimulated and refined my thinking along the way. Anne, Chia-Li, Laila, and Karen have devoted their own valuable time to reading drafts and making comments even in the midst of their own dissertation work. This dissertation has also been dependent on the activist work of the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the International Socialists, the Socialist Workers Party, and the diverse field of contemporary anarchists. The project was inspired by the hard work and dedication of these activists, and I am especially grateful to those who generously donated their time to grant me interviews. Thank you to General Baker, David Finkel, Dianne Feeley, Wendy Thompson, Debby Pope, Kate Stacy, Frank Thompson, Elissa Karg, and Paul Le Blanc for your time and your thoughtful responses to my questions. Milton Fisk and David Finkel also deserve my special thanks for being “on call” to answer my frequent questions about socialist history and to track down old friends on my behalf. I likewise want to acknowledge Lisa Lyons iv for allowing me to use her cartoon illustration from the 1970 IS Bulletin, Angela Dillard for permitting me to reprint her photograph of the Shrine of the Black Madonna mural, and Penny and Urban Scout for lending photographs from their blogs . Luke Tripp and Ernie Allen also offered their help in my attempts to contact former members of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and Urban Scout and Lisa Lyons provided useful commentary on my readings of their work. In addition, my family and friends have been invaluable in the writing process. My parents, Donna Carroll and Fred McTaggart, moved me to pursue graduate school in English with their constant support for my interests in writing and literature as a child. It was my Dad who took me to the University of Michigan library to pursue my first large- scale research project at the age of nine. Guiding me through microfilms of old newspapers about baseball’s Negro Leagues, he gave me the message that research and writing were fun and accessible. Today, I can’t thank my parents enough for their unwavering belief in my abilities, their essential commentary, and their generous willingness to tackle thankless proofreading jobs. My brother Ted, on the other hand, deserves much of the credit for the topic of this text. His commitments to political change and activism have always impressed me, and his convictions helped shape my views of valuable research topics. Finally, my partner Steve Sharpe has constantly listened to my ideas and helped me talk out the puzzles of this dissertation. I am in awe of his socially worthwhile and often thankless work at Indiana Legal Services, and I hope that I have contributed to his professional skills half as much as he has to mine. This dissertation is the product of our time in Bloomington. I dedicate it to Steve, looking forward to the new projects we will take on in the next city and the next stage of our lives. v Ursula McTaggart Radicalism in America’s “Industrial Jungle”: Metaphors of the Primitive and the Industrial in Activist Texts Scholars often view political texts as mere propaganda, characterized by rigid ideologies rather than the nuance of literature. This text argues the opposite through a study of post- 1945 American radical movements. Far from generating simple propaganda, social movements create rhetoric and imagery that engage with complex literary tropes. Specifically, this study addresses the use of “primitive” and “industrial” metaphors in African-American literature and four twentieth-century radical movements: the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the socialist tradition of taking industrial jobs, and the work of contemporary anarchists. Comparisons between these movements and Black Arts Movement texts, neo-slave narrative novels, and works of black speculative fiction illustrate the flaws and possibilities of each movement’s combination of aesthetics and politics. “Primitive” and “industrial” tropes form the backbone of this comparison because they illustrate how activists imagine the past, present, and future as they attempt to enact these liberation narratives. Moreover, few activists employ one of these metaphors without also relying on the other. Contemporary anarchists, then, dream of a return to hunter-gatherer behavior by dumpster diving in the urban and industrial settings; similarly, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers insisted that the auto worker was the key to revolution even as it decorated its newsletters with panthers and African masks. By focusing on the creative ways that political organizations have used these tropes, this project insists that the juncture between literature and political rhetoric has the potential to accommodate pragmatic political change, complex ethical questions, and rich aesthetic representations vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Key to Abbreviations .......................................................................................................viii List of Illustrations............................................................................................................. xi Introduction......................................................................................................................... 1 1: How the Panther Lost its Spots: Primitivism and the Black Panther Party .................. 36 2: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers Brings Back the Industrial Jungle ..... 113 3: Becoming the Worker, Becoming the Slave: The Socialist Project of Industrializing and the Neo-Slave Narrative........................................................................................... 190 4:Dumpster Diving and Post-Civilization Survival Skills: Anarchism and the New Primitive.......................................................................................................................... 259 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 331 Curriculum Vitae ............................................................................................................ 366 vii KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS AFL-CIO American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations AFSCME American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees AFT American Federation of Teachers BAM Black Arts Movement BART/S Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School BPP Black Panther Party CAP Congress of African Peoples COINTELPRO Cointerintelligence program Comintern Communist International (aka the Third International) CORE Congress of Racial Equality CP Communist Party CPUSA Communist Party-United States of America CWA Communications Workers of America diy do-it-yourself DRUM Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement DRUM Newsletter of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement ELRUM Eldon Revolutionary Union Movement ELRUM Newsletter of the Eldon Revolutionary Union Movement GM General Motors GOAL Group on Advanced Leadership IBT International Brotherhood of Teamsters viii ICV Inner-City Voice (newspaper of League of Revolutionary Black Workers) IMF International Monetary Fund IS International Socialists (U.S.) IWW International Workers of the World LCFO Lowndes County Freedom Organization LRBW League of Revolutionary Black Workers NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement NLF National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam NLRB National Labor Relations Board PL Progressive Labor (later the Progressive Labor Party [PLP]) RCP Revolutionary Communist Party RNA Republic of New Afrika RAM Revolutionary Action Movement SDS Students for a Democratic Society sf speculative fiction SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SP Socialist Party SSAC Soul Students Advisory Council SWP Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) TTU Telephone Traffic Union ix UAW United Auto Workers (officially United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America International Union) USAS United Students against Sweatshops USWA United Steelworkers of America
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