[mobglob-discuss] New Book "Murdered by Capitalism" - John Ross

Sat Jun 19 21:26:55 PDT 2004

Thought y'all be wantin' ta read Dan's post here on a new book by John Ross.
Best regards,  Tom

>>>On behalf of Dan Clore <clore at columbia-center.org> 6/19/2004 1:29:34 PM >>>
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo 

Saturday, June 19, 2004
Author leads vigil in Trinidad today at grave of dead 
'anarchist'
By The Times-Standard

A tombstone at the Trinidad Cemetery bears this epitaph: 
Murdered by Capitalism.

The grave carries the remains of E.B. Schnaubelt, brother of 
the infamous Rudolph "Haymarket" Schnaubelt.

E.B. Schnaubelt's life as an early 20th century anarchist 
(he even tried to develop a timber company cooperative in 
Trinidad at the turn of the century), is chronicled in a 
recently released book "Murdered By Capitalism."

Author John Ross, a former Humboldt County resident who now 
lives in Mexico City, will lead a vigil today that will 
start at 5 p.m. at Trinidad Trading Co. and wind its way to 
Schnaubelt's final resting place at the cemetery.

Ross, a journalist and author who also traveled to Iraq last 
year to serve as a "human shield," said he hopes the vigil 
will remind today's activists of the path blazed by early 
progressives like Schnaubelt.

"I want to try to give younger activists some context out of 
what's come before," Ross said.

Ross was also at Northtown Books Friday evening for a 
book-signing event.

*****

San Francisco Chronicle
A lefty's rollicking memoir
Ross can't spell, but he sure knows how to write
by David Kipen
Tuesday, June 8, 2004

Murdered by Capitalism
A Memoir of 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left
By John Ross

NATION BOOKS; 353 PAGES; $15.95
Note to self: Remember John Ross' "Murdered by Capitalism" 
for year-end best books list!

Note back from self: Who could forget?

The red-diaper baby of a probable FBI informant and a mother 
who helped organize a Broadway press-agents union, John Ross 
has survived police nightsticks, amphetamine addiction and 
an abortive stint as a human shield in Baghdad. Now he's 
written a ragged but downright glorious memoir, which 
doubles as a kind of "Spoon River Anthology" for the 
American left.

Like Edgar Lee Masters' half-forgotten classic, "Murdered by 
Capitalism" is, among much else, an oratorio for tombstones. 
The book starts out as a riotous, fanciful duet in a 
Humboldt County boneyard between Ross and the shade of 
Edward Schnaubelt, a suspect in Chicago's Haymarket bombing 
of 1886. Between them, they know a century and a half of 
radical history. Eventually, it all builds to a 
hell-for-leather chorus of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and 
anarcho-syndicalists -- not to mention the bronzed corpse of 
a brimstone-eating President McKinley.

All of which would have sufficed to sell out the initial 
print run at City Lights (whose co-founder, Lawrence 
Ferlinghetti, has joined Thomas Pynchon in ponying up an 
endorsement), but does little to prepare more apolitical 
readers for the rabid majesty of Ross' prose. Check out this 
hyperventilating hayride of a first line:

"Up against the splintery redwood fence at the top of the 
blazing green jewel box of a cemetery in the tiny fishing 
port of Trinidad, California, a few dozen miles short of the 
Oregon line, amid daffodils and daisies and the family plots 
of dead burghers and loggers, drowned fishermen and 
Christianized Indians, a solitary cenotaph wobbles in the 
Pacific wind like a peg-legged sailor

'E.B Schnaubelt
Born April 5th, 1855
Died May 22nd, 1913
MURDERED BY CAPITALISM'

the simple furious epitaph shouts."

I could have lived without those anticlimactic last five 
words, by which time the passage has more than made its 
point. But for panoramic sweep, high spirits and pure 
sensory impact, the thing ticks along with all the momentum 
of a saboteur's countdown. Ross even sneaks in the verb 
"wobble," as if to put readers on notice that this 
one-of-a-kind memoir will be, in both senses of the word, a 
Wobbly history.

"Murdered by Capitalism" isn't a perfect book, by any 
stretch. For one thing, decades of hallucinogens organic and 
synthetic appear to have spared Ross' memory but ravaged his 
spelling abilities. You can get a pretty good idea of how 
much ground Ross covers here just by looking at a list of 
the names he gets wrong. For a while it even looks as if 
he's doing it on purpose, to tweak people he disagrees with: 
Mormons, whose angel he spells Maroni; anti-Communists, 
whose old Nevada tribune he spells McCarren; Christians, 
whose messiah he has dead at 31 instead of 33; and 
reporter-turned-screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who once 
bird-dogged a scoop away from the author.

But Ross is just as bad with everybody else. The Newspaper 
Guild founder Heywood Broun he spells "Hayward Bruin," 
which, if nothing else, wins points for creativity. Ross 
muffs the spelling of presidential assassins Giuseppe 
Zangara and Charles Guiteau on consecutive pages. He puts 
the Ambassador Hotel in Hollywood, which it isn't, and he 
can't spell the name of the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm 
X died. It's a wonder he spells X right. What must the 
uncorrected proofs have looked like?

So why put up with a book that rails against amnesia of the 
political kind, only to perpetuate it orthographically? 
Because Ross is a prodigiously gifted stylist and 
storyteller. There's a great moment when he describes the 
fatal midnight of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's execution, 
with the "hands of the big illuminated clock atop S. Klein's 
[drawing] closer, like pincers."

For all Ross' radicalism, he never goes easy on the left. 
Much of the book's hysterically funny comedy comes from the 
incessant infighting his characters stoop to, even beyond 
the grave. As always, there's nobody like a Wobbly for a 
squabble. Ross and Schnaubelt repeatedly break over 
everything from doctrine to cover billing to anticipated 
royalty statements. And the cacophony of posthumous voices 
at the Martyrs' Monument in Chicago soon degenerates into 
accusations of promiscuity, "variationism" and -- the 
ultimate liberal heresy -- lowering their cemetery's 
property values. Ross is never slow to condemn progressives 
for inhabiting, as he puts it, "a bubble of our own blowing."

Of course, there are passages here that will make most 
conservative readers do a spit take. It's one thing to 
believe that McKinley's murder was the rare political 
assassination that actually worked out for the best. It's 
quite another to read Ross' fantasy about dynamiting the 
Bush family's Christmas barbecue.

Luckily, Ross restricts these less housebroken impulses to 
the realm of daydream. "Although I talked a good bomb game," 
he writes, "the only ones I ever threw were packed with 
words." And packed, for the most part, smooth as Plastique.

By the way, "Murdered by Capitalism" is E.B. Schnaubelt's 
real Trinidad epitaph, as evidenced in a couple of the 
photos that accompany the text. Some fine unattributed Day 
of the Dead-style woodcuts turn up, too, looking 
suspiciously like the work of the great Mexican illustrator 
José Guadalupe Posada.

One such tableau introduces the rousing seven-page poem with 
which Ross' book closes, "The Days of the Dead of the 
American Left." It's a pageant poem of the kind Roger Angell 
used to write for the New Yorker's Christmas issues, a 
cavalcade of calaveras in which all the heroes and villains 
of southpaw folklore take a curtain call:

... Warren Beatty schtuped Louise Bryant
while Clarence Darrow signed up clients,
Jack London and J. Robert Oppenheimer
competed at Scrabble without a timer,
Karl Marx hugged Groucho, Gummo, and Zeppo
(Harpo and Chico got left at the depot) ...

That's Ross all over. The meter's off, the spelling 
questionable. But the rhymes are ingenious and, my, doesn't 
it swing?

E-mail David Kipen at
mailto:dkipen at sfchronicle.com 

-- 
Dan Clore

Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro 
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/ 
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo 

"It's a political statement -- or, rather, an
*anti*-political statement. The symbol for *anarchy*!"
-- Batman, explaining the circle-A graffiti, in
_Detective Comics_ #608

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     "There's no way to delay, that trouble comin' everyday."
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