Archie Green: The Making of a Working-Class Hero

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. “Working-Class Hero” is from the album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (Apple/ EMI, 1970). 2. Denning, The Cultural Front, xviii. 3. Archie Green to Professor Richard Dorson, Jan. 30, 1962. Richard Dorson file, Archie Green Papers (20002), Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (hereafter Archie Green Papers, Wilson Library, UNC). 4. “Recognition of Archie Green.” 5. Gross Bressler, “Culture and Politics: A Legislative Chronicle of the American Folklife Preservation Act.” 6. Buhle and Schulman, eds., Wobblies. 7. The term Old Left, as used to describe Green’s generation of political activists, gained traction in younger, New Left political communities of the 1960s. The term naturally reflects the younger generation’s intention of distinguishing and distancing itself from its predecessors. Core differences revolved around issues of leadership, organization, relation to the state, the nature of imperialism, and conceptions of politics and power. 8. Denning, The Cultural Front, xiv. 9. In its most specific meaning, the Popular Front refers to an antifascist political strategy adopted at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in the summer of 1935. In terms of the Communist Party’s political platform, the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact on August 22, 1939, marked the end of the Popular Front (Parts 1,2, and 3). The alliance building, which was central to the Popular Front in the United States, entailed important new relationships between cultural work and political work. 152 . Notes to Pages xix–5 10.Denning, The Cultural Front, xviii, 5;David Roediger, Foreword, in O’Conner, O’Conner, and Bowler, Harvey and Jessie, x. 11.In leading up to the publication of this book, I published an article focusing on Green’s contributions to public labor history. Burns, “Going Public,” 164–79. 12.Finnegan, “Only a Folklorist,” 43–63. 13. Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. 14. Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle, 242. 15.On the prominence of narrative in New Labor History see Green’s Taking History to Heart, 9. 16. Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giula, 259. 17. Roediger, “Poetry and Working Class History: Sterling Brown, for Example,” in History against Misery, 52. 18.Burns, “Going Public,” addresses this long-term project of Green’s. 19. There are many varieties of syndicalism, making it difficult and unproductive to neatly define the term. At its core, as a philosophy of social change, syndicalism asserts that workers (and their workplace) can and should be the primary unit around which society is organized. Syndicalists of many viewpoints therefore share the belief that workers, organized as some form of association or union, should control the means through which a society produces what it needs to survive and flourish. For more on syndicalism in the context of United States labor history it is important to study the Industrial Workers of the World and the Syndicalist League of North America. 20. MARHO (Radical Historians Organization), Visions of History, ed. Henry Abelove et al., 153. 21.Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. 22. Kelley (Race Rebels, 10)emphasizes that social movement studies need to ask more questions about why people make the commitments they do. 23.Pete Seeger file, Archie Green Papers, Wilson Library, UNC. Chapter 1. Family, Revolution, and Emigration 1.For most of this book I will refer to Archie Green by his surname. Because this chapter includes many references to his parents and siblings, however, I will occasionally use his given name. 2. Interviews with Archie Green, Feb. 10, 2006, March 27, 2008. 3. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, 10–1 5. 4. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Written as a political pamphlet in 1912,What Is to Be Done? maps out Lenin’s conception of how a revolutionary vanguard party can lead the working classes. 5. I use Samuel rather than Shmuel to refer to Green’s father because that is how Archie referred to him throughout our interviews. 6. Interview with Mitzie Green, Dec. 22, 2006. 7. Interview with Archie Green, Feb. 21,2006. Given Samuel’s combined interests in Jewish cultural nationalism, modern secularism, and socialism, it is surprising Notes to Pages 5–10 . 153 that, according to Archie, he never spoke about the Bund (or Jewish Labor Bund). The Bund, founded in 1897, was a socialist union of Jewish workers that spread across many countries within the Russian Empire. 8. Interview with Archie Green, Feb...