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The Thoreau Society Bulletin ISSN 0040-6406 Number 310 Summer 2020 Thoreau and John Brown as Proletarian Heroes: Mike Gold’s Battle Hymn by Patrick Chura There was a socialist movement in America a hundred years before the Russian Revolution. Albert Brisbane and Bronson Alcott preached Utopian communism and Emerson and Thoreau heard them. —Mike Gold1 In a course I regularly teach about U.S. literature of the Depression decade, I include the work of leftist writer Michael Gold, usually by assigning his bestselling 1930 novel Jews Without Money. Recently I introduced students to Battle Hymn, a play about the life of John Brown scripted by Gold with editing help from Michael Blankfort. A lesser known work by a largely forgotten author, Battle Hymn nevertheless illustrates why Gold was once the most famous communist writer in America. Gold practically invented the genre of “proletarian” literature and fiercely advocated socially conscious protest art; he also had a special affinity for Thoreau. In a controversial article Gold published in 1930, he excoriated the “irritating and pretentious” literary style of the “genteel bourgeoisie,” calling on American writers to instead adopt “the language of the clean, rugged Thoreau.”2 Battle Hymn, an ambitious three-act drama produced during the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Theatre Project’s initial New York season of 1936, applies Thoreau’s political ethos to the modern class struggle. The play blends Library of Congress socialist realism with agitprop elements to both represent Poster for the 1936 production of Battle Hymn at the Brown’s life and assert similarities between the abolitionist past and a Depression-era present in which communism was a Experimental Theater in New York City, showing a silhouette mainstream ideology.3 of John Brown . The play’s large cast of 84 named performers portrays a range of historical figures—from Jefferson Davis and Justice Roger B. Taney. Several famed abolitionists, including Abraham Lincoln to Senator William H. Seward and Chief Boston-based William Lloyd Garrison and Gerrit Smith of New Contents This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent: Thoreau and John Brown as Proletarian Heroes: Mike Gold’s A Review . 10 Battle Hymn . 1 Additions to the Thoreau Bibliography . 11 Thoreau and the Economics of Crime and Punishment. .4 . President’s Column . 14 Lessons from Walden: Thoreau and the Crisis of American Democracy: Notes from Concord . 14. A Review . .6 . Tribute to Bob Galvin . 15 Black Walden: Slavery and its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts: Notes & Queries . .16 . A Review . .8 . The Thoreau Society of Japan Annual Meeting 2019 . 19. 2 | Thoreau Society Bulletin Number 310 Summer 2020 interested, asking, “How will you do it?” Eventually a majority of the ten men present support Brown, largely because Thoreau, Sanborn, and Bondi convert the cautious Emerson to the side of revolution. When Emerson inquires whether Brown realizes the “powerful forces” he is up against, the militant replies, “I do, sir. We are attacking the Government of the United States.” Quickly and decisively, Thoreau interjects, “And why not?” Bondi, who emigrated from Austria after the failed revolution of 1848 to eventually fight alongside Brown in Kansas, clearly embodies a combination of anti-slavery and pro- labor agitation: “As an American Abolitionist, and as a wage-worker, my place is beside Captain Brown.” Earlier in the play, Bondi had closely York, are joined on stage by the Concord anti-slavery faction, paraphrased Marxist theory: “Labor, even with a white skin, can represented by Franklin Sanborn, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and never be free as long as labor with a black skin is enslaved.”6 the transcendentalist whose glorification of Brown surpassed all others, Thoreau. In a New York Times assessment of the play’s premiere, reviewer Lewis Nichols offered vague praise for the “good solid history” and acting of the production. His remarks about the political implications of the drama were misleading, calling Gold’s version of the militant abolitionist “A fair portrayal, avoiding alike the Thoreau deification of Brown, and the reverse theory that he was simply insane.”4 More accurately, Gold’s John Brown is a complex character, but there is never a question about the sanctity of his cause, a factor that allows Thoreau’s “deification” of the abolitionist to become the play’s main premise. A fascinating ensemble scene occurs at the home of Gerrit Smith in 1859. Brown reveals his daring plan to Emerson, Garrison, Sanborn, and Thoreau. Less famous participants in the scene include Mr. Hickey, a New Englander who stood with Brown in the Kansas border wars, and August Bondi, a Jewish- American proletarian who seems to speak for Mike Gold. Though the encounter is fictional, it draws aptly on social history to sum up the logic of Thoreau’s hatred for slavery. The dialogue is skillful also in representing Brown’s biblical speech patterns, the youthful fervor of Sanborn, and Emerson’s calm eloquence. When Hickey enters and asks, “What did you think of what we did in Kansas, Mr. Emerson?” the Sage of Concord replies, “It was worth many libraries.” When Brown introduces himself by asking the preliminary question of “whether you gentlemen are with me,” Thoreau responds first: “With all my heart!” Emerson follows with, “For every slave you free, I’ll thank God,” after which Sanborn adds, “Are we with you? What a question. I’m yours to command.”5 Opinions among the group diverge when Brown reveals his intent to take the fight into the South at Harpers Ferry. Garrison calls the plan “madness.” Emerson hesitates, stating “You can’t National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia Commons mean that.” Sanborn retorts, “Let him finish,” and Thoreau is Scenes from the 1936 production of Battle Hymn . Number 310 Summer 2020 Thoreau Society Bulletin | 3 A telling moment comes when Garrison refers to Harpers Ferry agitational activity of John Brown was a predecessor of the current as “a program of murder.” In a terse reply, Thoreau accepts the work of the Communist Party and that the Civil War was a forerunner inevitable: “Murder, yes.” Such explosive language causes uneasiness of the coming proletarian revolution.”11 even in Brown: “Pray, don’t call my deeds murder. I’m doing only For Gold, this clearly suggested that Thoreau, as Brown’s what I believe.”7 champion, would have supported the labor radicalism of the American The scene ends with an exchange that captures the divisive yet Communist Party. Asked by Emerson what “impression” Brown had elevating force of Brown’s personality: made on him, Gold’s Thoreau gives an interesting answer: “This John Brown, Waldo, is like an intense fire burning in the night. He believes GARRISON. Don’t give him money. I warn you all, the in direct speech and direct action.”12 political consequences will be extremely serious. This is treason, During the 1930s, “direct action” inspired a number of work gentlemen. stoppages, including the sit-down strikes in the tire industry that took THOREAU. (Bursting with bitterness) Treason? You talk of place in Akron, Ohio, at the time of Battle Hymn’s premiere. The song treason. He brings us human sung by Goodyear employees as beings, he acts on a higher they began their famous strike law than governments, he was “John Brown’s Body.” This gives us the word of God, anthem, reworked by Julia Ward and you talk of treason. Howe during the Civil War and GARRISON. (Hotly) But renamed “Battle Hymn of the we’re living in a world of Republic,” provided the title for men. Steinbeck’s 1939 The Grapes THOREAU. He’s living in a of Wrath, a labor masterpiece world with God. (Silence— that reinforced a revolutionary uneasy movement.) linkage between chattel and EMERSON. I’m a little wage slavery. Three years before ashamed of myself that I Steinbeck, the title of Gold’s even question him. play reinforced the same link. SMITH. There’ll be blood. I Essentially, Battle Hymn asserts can see it now, flowing over that Brown and Henry Thoreau this land like flood waters. can be understood as heroes of SANBORN. And there’ll be the proletariat, relevant figures in freedom! any period of capitalist-imposed SMITH. I can’t give him economic crisis. money for this. Though J. Edgar Hoover EMERSON. (Rises) Mr. assigned an FBI agent to look Smith, you’ll have my bank into the published text of Battle draft for two hundred and Hymn in the McCarthy era, post- fifty dollars in the morning. war literary critics largely left My God, we talk of money. the play alone. When scholar This man is going forth to Richard Tuerk noticed Battle die. (EMERSON starts for Hymn in 1985, he found “ample the door. THOREAU puts evidence” for viewing Thoreau his head in his hands, and as a precursor of American starts to weep silently as the labor radicalism but suggested lights dim, and –) that Thoreau could never have THE CURTAIN FALLS8 accepted communism because he “placed faith in the individual, not the group.”13 The latter judgment reflected a Cold-War-era tendency As Laura Walls has noted, when Thoreau received news of to define communism solely as an economic theory rather than as a Brown’s failed raid, “He was shaken to realize that two years before, liberation movement. We might now acknowledge that Gold’s special he had doubted Brown,” and that “worse, entering Brown’s life enthusiasm for Thoreau was not based on economics or even politics, had forced him to confront the unimaginable.”9 The unimaginable but on humanity. was a series of circumstances in which he, the gentle “saint of the In a column Gold wrote for the Communist Daily Worker in 1946, woods,” could both kill or be killed for justice’s sake.
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