Frank Beacham's Journal

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones staged a "Children's Crusade" 118 years ago to protest child labor in textile mills and mines

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones staged a "Children's Crusade" 118 years ago to protest child labor in textile mills and mines.

Accompanied by child workers, she walked from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt's home in Oyster Bay, New York to protest the plight of child laborers. They carried signs that said: “We want to go to school and not the mines!”

The struggle to keep children from working in textile mills and mines would go on for years. It finally came to head with many other issues in the Textile Strike of 1934.

On the morning of September 6, 1934, in the tiny town of Honea Path, South Carolina, my home town, seven people were killed and 30 others wounded in violence caused by mill management over the strike. The man who ran that mill was my grandfather.

For 60 years, the story of a mass killing in a small town was successfully erased, not only from the history books, but from the public consciousness of those people most affected by it. The story of the killings was revealed in 1995.

The disillusionment of the workers and the outrageous conduct by the mill owners, especially in Honea Path, made a strong impression on the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt.

This helped spur passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. Out of these laws came reforms that vastly improved the lives of all workers, even in states where unionization didn’t take hold.

One major example was child labor, the subject of Mother Jones’ protest. The Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 outlawed employment of children under sixteen in textile mills. It was a major milestone.

Because this practice is now illegal, children have a better chance at a quality life by staying in school rather than being exploited as cheap labor. Other major reforms that came out of the labor unrest were the establishment of the minimum wage and the 40 hour work week.

The story of the labor violence in Honea Path is in my book, “Whitewash: A Southern Journey through Music, Mayhem and Murder.”

William Kunstler, radical lawyer and civil rights activist, known for his politically unpopular clients, was born 102 years ago today

William Kunstler: A Personal Remembrance

William Kunstler, radical lawyer and civil rights activist, known for his politically unpopular clients, was born 102 years ago today.

Kunstler was a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the co-founder of the Law Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the "leading gathering place for radical lawyers in the country."

Kunstler's defense of the "Chicago Seven" from 1969–1970 led The New York Times to label him "the country's most controversial and, perhaps, its best-known lawyer ..."

Kunstler is also well known for defending members of the Catonsville Nine, Black Panther Party, Weather Underground Organization, the Attica Prison rioters and the American Indian Movement.

I remember William Kunstler for another reason. He was a wonderful poet. Once I attended a poetry reading in his New York City apartment.

As a reviewer wrote of his poems, “like most things William Kunstler does, his poems rattle the foundations of venerable American institutions.”

Kunstler won a lot of major cases, but I was impressed by his creative abilities as a poet. He saw the world in a unique way and expressed it vividly in his poems.

In fact, one his clients and closest friends was the poet, Dylan Thomas, who he had met while majoring in French literature at Yale. Kunstler became an expert on Thomas’s work and was called the night the poet drank himself to death at the White Horse Tavern in New York City.

In late 1995, Kunstler died in New York City of heart failure at the age of 76.

Above, Kunstler and his daughter, Sarah, is shown in 1977. Sarah and her sister, Emily, wrote and directed the film about their father.

Photo by Maddy Miller

Jean Cocteau, French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker, was born 132 years ago today

Jean Cocteau, French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker, was born 132 years ago today.

Cocteau wrote the novel, Les Enfants terribles (1929), and made the films, Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Orpheus (1949).

His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Yul Brynner, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky, María Félix, Édith Piaf and Raymond Radiguet.

In his early twenties, Cocteau became associated with the writers Marcel Proust, André Gide and Maurice Barrès. In 1912, he collaborated with Léon Bakst on Le Dieu bleu for the Ballets Russes. The principal dancers were Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky.

During World War I, Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. This was the period in which he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, and numerous other writers and artists with whom he later collaborated.

Russian choreographer, Sergei Diaghilev, persuaded Cocteau to write a scenario for a ballet, which resulted in Parade, in 1917. It was produced by Diaghilev, with sets by Picasso, the libretto by Apollinaire and the music by Erik Satie. The piece was later expanded into a full opera — with music by Satie, Poulenc and Ravel.

An important exponent of avant-garde art, Cocteau had great influence on the work of others, including the group of composers known as Les six. In the early 1920s, he and other members of Les six frequented a wildly popular bar named Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a name that Cocteau himself had a hand in picking.

The popularity of the bar was due in no small measure to the presence of Cocteau and his friends.

Cocteau's experiments with the human voice peaked with his play La Voix humaine. The story involves one woman on stage speaking on the telephone with her (invisible and inaudible) departing lover, who is leaving her to marry another woman. The telephone proved to be the perfect prop for Cocteau to explore his ideas, feelings and "algebra" concerning human needs and realities in communication.

In 1940, Le Bel Indifférent, Cocteau's play written for and starring Édith Piaf, was enormously successful. He also worked with Pablo Picasso on several projects and was friends with most of the European art community.

Cocteau's films, most of which he both wrote and directed, were particularly important in introducing the avant-garde into French cinema and influenced to a certain degree the upcoming French New Wave genre.

In 1945, Cocteau was one of several designers who created sets for the Théâtre de la Mode. He drew inspiration from filmmaker René Clair while making Tribute to René Clair: I Married a Witch.

Cocteau died of a heart attack at his chateau in Milly-la-Forêt, Essonne, France, on October 11, 1963 at the age of 74.

Above, Cocteau in 1923

On this day — 166 years ago — Walt Whitman's first edition of the self-published, Leaves of Grass, was printed. It contained a dozen poems

On this day — 166 years ago — Walt Whitman's first edition of the self-published, Leaves of Grass, was printed. It contained a dozen poems.

Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island, and raised in Brooklyn. He left school at the age of 14 to become a journeyman printer and later worked as a teacher, journalist, editor and carpenter to support his writing.

In 1855, he self-published, Leaves of Grass, which carried his picture but not his name. He revised the book many times, constantly adding and rewriting poems.

The second edition, in 1856, included his "Sundown Poem," later called "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," one of his most beloved pieces.

Whitman sometimes took long ferry and coach rides as an excuse to talk with people, and was also fond of long walks and cultural events in Manhattan.

In 1862, Whitman's brother was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and Whitman went to care for him. He spent the rest of the war comforting both Union and Confederate soldiers.

After the war, Whitman worked for several government departments until 1873, when he suffered a stroke. He spent the rest of his life in Camden, New Jersey, and continued to issue revised editions of Leaves of Grass until shortly before his death in 1892.

Walt Whitman, 1887

Above photo by George C. Cox

(This image is said to have been Whitman's favorite from the photo-session. Cox published about seven images for Whitman, who so admired this image that he even sent a copy to the poet Tennyson in England. Whitman sold the other copies.)

Ted Joans, jazz poet, surrealist, trumpeter and painter, was born 93 years ago today

Ted Joans performs in New York City, 1994

Photo by Frank Beacham

Ted Joans, jazz poet, surrealist, trumpeter and painter, was born 93 years ago today.

Joans work stands at the intersection of several avant-garde streams and some have seen in it a precursor to the orality of the spoken-word movement. However, he criticized the competitive aspect of "slam" poetry. Joans is known for his motto: "Jazz is my religion and Surrealism is my point of view."

Born in Cairo, Illinois, as Theodore Jones, his parents worked on the riverboats that plied the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. He played the trumpet and was an avid jazz aficionado, following Bop as it developed, and continued to espouse jazz of all styles and eras throughout his life.

Growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky, he earned a degree in fine arts from Indiana University, before moving in 1951 to New York City. In New York, he painted in a style he called, Jazz Action, and read his poetry, developing a personal style of oral delivery he called, Jazz Poetry.

A participant in the Beat Generation in Greenwich Village, Joans was a contemporary and friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Leroi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Bob Kaufman and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Joans shared a room for a time with the great jazz musician, Charlie Parker. His bohemian costume balls and rent parties were photographed by Fred McDarrah and Weegee.

Joans was also deeply involved in Surrealism, meeting Joseph Cornell. At first becoming close to his childhood hero, Salvador Dalí, Joans soon broke with him. In Paris, he was welcomed into the circle of André Breton.

Joans was an erudite Africanist and traveled extensively throughout the continent, frequently on foot, over many decades between periods in Europe and North America. From the 1960s onward, he had a house in Tanger, Morocco, and then in Timbuktu, Mali. While he ceased playing the trumpet, he maintained a jazz sensibility in the reading of his poems and frequently collaborated with musicians.

He continued to travel and maintained an active correspondence with a host of creative individuals, among them Langston Hughes, Michel Leiris, Aimé Césaire, Robert Creeley, Jayne Cortez, Stokely Carmichael, Ishmael Reed, Paul Bowles and Franklin and Penelope Rosemont.

Many of these letters are collected at the Bancroft Library of the University of California Berkeley. The University of Delaware houses his correspondence with Charles Henri Ford. Joans was also a close correspondent/participant of the Chicago Surrealist Group.

Joans' painting, Bird Lives, hangs in the De Young Museum in San Francisco. He was also the originator of the "Bird Lives" legend and graffiti in New York City after the death of Charlie Parker in March, 1955.

Joans invented the technique of outagraphy, in which the subject of a photograph is cut out of the image. His visual art work spans collages, assemblage objects, paintings and drawings including many resulting from the collaborative surrealist game, Cadavre Exquis. The rhinoceros is a frequent subject in his work in all media. He also created short Super 8 film works.

During the early 1980s, Joans was a writer in residence in Berlin, Germany, under the auspices of the DAAD (Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst) program. He was a contributor of jazz essays and reviews to magazines such as Coda and Jazz Magazine.

His autobiographical text, "Je Me Vois," appeared in the Contemporary Authors Autobiographical Series, Volume 25, published by Gale Research. His work has been included in numerous anthologies. In the late 1990s, Joans relocated to Seattle and resided there and in Vancouver, between travels, until 2003. He was the recipient of the American Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001, from the Before Columbus Foundation.

Joans died in Vancouver, British Columbia, on April 25, 2003 due to complications from diabetes. He was 75 years old and had 10 children. One of his daughters, Daline, was named after Salvador Dalí.

Here is the first part of “Jazz and Poetry” by Louis va Gasteren. It features poetry by Ted Joans.

“Don't let the minute spoil the hour.”

— Ted Joans

Photo by Frank Beacham

Hermann Hesse was born 144 years ago today

Hermann Hesse was born 144 years ago today.

Hesse was a German-born Swiss poet, novelist and painter. His works include Steppenwolf, Siddhartha and The Glass Bead Game. Each work explores an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality.

In 1946, Hesse received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

William Butler Yeats was born 156 years ago today

William Butler Yeats was born 156 years ago today.

An Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature, Yeats was a pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms.

Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years.

In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honored for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."

Born in Sandymount, Ireland on this day in 1865, Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize. Such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). Yeats was a close friend of Ezra Pound, the American expatriate poet and Bollingen Prize laureate.

Yeats wrote the introduction for Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali, which was published by the India Society.

From 1900, Yeats's poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.

Here is Yeats in 1903

Photo by Alice Boughton

Allen Ginsberg was born 95 years ago today

Allen Ginsberg, 1954

Allen Ginsberg was born 95 years ago today.

A poet and one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon would follow, Ginsberg vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression.

Ginsberg is best known for his epic poem, "Howl," in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. In 1957, "Howl" attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, as it depicted heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state.

"Howl" reflected Ginsberg's own homosexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner.

Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, adding, "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?"

Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. He lived modestly, buying his clothing in second-hand stores and residing in downscale apartments in New York’s East Village. One of his most influential teachers was the Tibetan Buddhist, the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa, founder of the Naropa Institute, now Naropa University at Boulder, Colorado.

At Trungpa's urging, Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, the poet, started The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics there in 1974.

Ginsberg took part in decades of non-violent political protest against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs. His poem, "September on Jessore Road," calling attention to the plight of Bangladeshi refugees, exemplifies what the literary critic Helen Vendler described as Ginsberg's tireless persistence in protesting against "imperial politics and persecution of the powerless."

His collection, The Fall of America, shared the annual U.S. National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. In 1979, he received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

In 1986, Ginsberg was awarded the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings in Struga, Macedonia. Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992.

Ginsberg died April 5, 1997, surrounded by family and friends in his East Village loft in New York City, succumbing to liver cancer via complications of hepatitis. He was 70 years old.

Here, Allen Ginsberg reads the first part of his poem, Howl

Allen Ginsberg with Frank Beacham, 1975

Leonard Cohen meets Allen Ginsberg after his concert at the Wiltern Theatre, Los Angeles, 1988

Photo by Frank Beacham

Walt Whitman was born 202 years ago today

Walt Whitman was born 202 years ago today.

A poet, essayist and journalist, Whitman was also a humanist — a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. He is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse.

His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection, "Leaves of Grass," which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.

Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk and — in addition to publishing his poetry — was a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842).

Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined.

He died at age 72 and his funeral became a public spectacle.

Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his life. He supported the Wilmot Proviso and opposed the extension of slavery generally. His poetry presented an egalitarian view of the races, and at one point he called for the abolition of slavery, but later he saw the abolitionist movement as a threat to democracy.

Raymond Carver was born 83 years ago today

Raymond Carver was born 83 years ago today.

Carver was an American short story writer and poet, and contributed to the revitalization of the American short story in literature during the 1980s.

Born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, Carver grew up in Yakima, Washington, the son of Elta Beatrice (Casey) and Clevie Raymond Carver. His father, a skilled sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a fisherman and heavy drinker. Carver's mother worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. He had one brother.

Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. In his spare time, he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, and hunted and fished with friends and family.

After graduating from Yakima High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California. In June, 1957, at age 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, who had just graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls. Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December, 1957. Their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born the next year when Carver was 20.

He supported his family by working as a delivery man, janitor, library assistant and sawmill laborer. During their marriage, Maryann also supported the family by working as an administrative assistant and a high school English teacher, salesperson and waitress.

Carver became interested in writing in California, where he had moved with his family because his mother-in-law had a home in Paradise. He attended a creative writing course taught by the novelist, John Gardner, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career.

His first published story, The Furious Seasons, appeared in 1961. More florid than his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner. Furious Seasons was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and can now be found in the recent collections, No Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me.

Carver’s first short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was published in 1976. The collection itself was shortlisted for the National Book Award, though it sold fewer than 5,000 copies that year. During his years of working different jobs, rearing children and trying to write, Carver started to drink heavily.

By his own admission, eventually he more or less gave up writing and took to full-time drinking. In the fall semester of 1973, Carver was a visiting lecturer in the Iowa Writers' Workshop with John Cheever, but Carver stated that they did less teaching than drinking and almost no writing.

The next year, after leaving Iowa City, Carver went to a treatment center to attempt to overcome his alcoholism. However, he continued drinking for three years. After being hospitalized three times (between June, 1976 and February or March, 1977), Carver began his "second life" and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Carver — who continued to smoke marijuana and experimented with cocaine at the behest of Jay McInerney during a 1980 visit to New York City — believed he would have died of alcoholism at the age of 40 if he hadn't found a way to stop drinking.

On August 2, 1988, Carver died from lung cancer at the age of 50.

Above, Carver, shown in 1984

Photo by Bob Adelman