Ivan Doig - Bucking the Sun

Having read Ivan Doig's beautiful memoir about growing up in rural Montana before I visited that state recently, I was keen to read one of his novels. Unsurprisingly it turned out to be very easy to find Doig's books in Montana's second hand bookshops. He remains, after all, one of the state's most celebrated writers. His books are often set around key moments in Montana's history, and tell stories imbued with historical accuracy.

Bucking the Sun is one of a series of books by Doig set in the north of the state. It is focused on the extended Duff family, homesteaders who have struggled to earn a living from the dry prairie soil, and who are kicked off their land. A New Deal project to build the enormous Fort Peck Dam will flood their farm and the book opens with the government man giving the Duff patriarch the news. The Duffs become New Deal workers on the huge project, which, by coincidence is managed by their son, a leading dam architect. If this conincidence is a little to unbelievable for the reader, it is worth suspending disbelief at this point, as the novel has a lot to offer, despite the contrived set up.

The book opens however with an aging, retired and right-wing sheriff who is thinking back on his career in a old people's home. One unsolved case still bugs him, a case in which two naked bodies were found in a car at the bottom of the Fort Peck resivoir. These entangled lovers were both Duffs, but as the opening chapter concludes, neither was married to the other.

The novel builds up to a climax were the identities of the two Duffs is finally revealed. As the family works on the dam, encouraged and helped along by the senior position of their eldest son, we see their lives, loves and laughs along the way. We also see the hardship of the New Deal work, and the difficulties of life in the West, as the Dam rises, so do the shanty towns around it - a new Wild West. 

Doig's put a lot of research into the book - there is a great deal here about what happened that seems historically accurate. But I found the other things telling. The way women get opportunities from the New Deal that give them a level of independence. The lives and work of sex workers at the time. Yet for me, most fascinating, is the radical history that links the struggles of factory workers in the First World War in Scotland, to the strikes and protests of 1930s America. I don't know what Doig's politics were, but the sympathy here with strikers, underdogs, protesters, sabetours and Communists are apparent. His knowledge of politics is enough to include passing reference to Trotskyists, that will please other leftie readers like myself.

Ultimately the story here is in the telling. To a certain extent I was disappointed with the ending - in fact I wasn't really that interested. If Doig hadn't inserted chapters with the Sheriff's flashbacks, I would have forgotten all about the opening mystery. What I was really invested in was the thing that all the other characters were obsessed with - the building of Fort Peck Dam itself. In fact, I might try and see it, should I ever return.

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Doig - This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

Gerald Horne - The Dawning of the Apocalypse

Gerald Horne's earlier book The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism described the horrors that arose from European colonialism in the Americas. The policies of genocide that saw millions die and suffer from war, slavery and disease. But how did this come about, and in particular, how did the political ideology that justified it arise?

The Dawning of the Apocalypse tells this story. In it Horne argues that it was the struggle between the European powers, mediated by the fight against the Ottoman that gave the impetus for settler colonialism to flourish. The importance of this, as Horne says, lies in the fact that "the contemporary United States remains ensconced in the shadow of the original colonisers". The original discovery and opening up of the route to the Americas came from the adventurers and slavers of Portugal and Spain, but "the genocide that was visited pon the indigenous of North America was a rolling process, with the republican knockout blow facilitated mightily by the preceding blows inflicted by Madrid". Spain might not have won out in the Americas, but she opened up the space for Britain to do the next stage of the dirty work. 

Much of this book explores why Spain did not build on the earlier arrival of her explorers, slavers and troops in Americas. Much of this is to do with how Spain struggled with her great rivals, the Ottomans, around the Mediteranean and in North Africa. But Horne argues the biggest issue was that Spain had a different ideological approach to colonialism. 

Post 1492, Spain was on the march but exposed a glaring weakness when it at times allowed religious sectarianism to trump racist solidarity. England filled the breach when it turned this paradigm on its head and did not allow the conversion of Africans to Protestantism to prevent their being enslaved, and eventually invited the presume Catholid foe to join the brutal colonising of what became Maryland.

In other words England was able to construct a racist ideology, of whiteness, that allowed them to proceed in North American and drive through their own agenda in a more efficient, brutal and successful way that Spain could. Horne also argued that Spain's war on the Muslims, meant that they failed to develop new technological and scientific ideas that, in England's hands, provided extra tools and understanding to exploit the Americas. Spain's war with the Ottomans sucked resources out that prevented her building on their first place in the Americas. But, Horne argues, it was on the question of racism that Spain's ship floundered.

By sticking stubbornly to religiosity in an age of colonialism moving steadily toward the Pan-European "whiteness" that became London's specialty, Spain was determined to fall behind, though even when Madrid emulated London, they flubbed. Even after Alcazar, the local elite in Havana sought to expel the free Negro popluation but was blocked by higher powers. Religious intensity sat alonside solonialism uneasily, a system that tended to advantage racist intensity.

Later Horne writes:

I would say that religious secatrianism and Inquisition mandatges hampered the ability of Madrid to pursue what turned out to be the wining course executed by London, which was Pan-Europeanism and "whiteness" broadnening the base of settler colonialism - increasing the number of 'backwoods settlers' - racialiszing and deeming inferior those not deemd to be 'white' and moving aggressively on two fronts: seizing land and enslaving willy-nilly.

The problem I had with Horne's thesis is that I didn't feel he adequately explained how "whiteness" was constructed. It is certainly true that racial justifications for slavery helped create modern racism. But what of the "whiteness" behind London's strategy over Madrid? This is less clear from Horne's book and I wasn't able to find an explanation. I felt that Horne's earlier points - that Spain fell behind London for a number of reasons such as spending vast resources on fighting the Ottomans and not adequately developing its technological base, hinted at the way that England was developed further because it was able to unleash capital accumulation in a way that Spain could not. In other words, Spain was held back by its semi-feudal social organisation far longer than England. That's why England was able to eventually catch up and supercede Spain. In fact, one cold argue that "whiteness", or at least racism, was more a product of capitalism than anything else. Perhaps Spain would have got there eventually.

Nonetheless, Horne conclusion is right:

By 1700, Spanish armed forces were no more than 63,000' France's about 342,000; and said one source, "Britain was not far behind." The immediate furture was to belong to the United States, which, sharpening the effective tool that was 'whiteness' developed a population base that made these cited figures seem puny by comparison.

The backdrop to this - the indigenous struggles against colonialism, the battles against racism and slavery and the rebellion of the oppressed that Gerald Horne so able places at the heart of this book - were not enough to prevent the establishment of the racist, settler colonial power in Washington. The world has long had to pay the price.

Related Reviews

Gerald Horne - The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism

Duncan Hallas - The Great Revolutions

Duncan Hallas was a leading activist and Trotskyist in post-war Britain. He was part of the networks that became the International Socialists and then the Socialist Workers' Party. While I only met him a few times as a much younger activist, even today longer standing comrades talk about him as a great agitator. He was, by all accounts, a tremendous speaker and writer, with a depth of knowledge and experience that allowed him to put across complex ideas in accessible ways. There are many on the left today who'd benefit from learning Hallas' ability to talk to workers.

The Great Revolutions is a new book made up of a series of articles that Hallas wrote for Socialist Worker in 1973. Then the British working class was on a high, having just defeated a Tory government the previous year and many activists thought that the high levels of struggle would continue under Labour. Sadly this was not to happen. But these levels of struggle no doubt led to the editors commissioning Hallas to write this series of pieces on "Great Revolutions", stretching from the English Civil War and the American Revolution, through the French Revolution, 1848, the Paris Commune and finally the Russian Revolutions.

These are short, agitational pieces designed to educate readers in the basics of events. But don't let brevity imply simplicity. Hallas' ability to get across complex events in the minimum of words and without academic fluff is definitely on display here. In fact, what is on display, is nothing short of a brilliant grasp of the Marxist method. Hallas shows how different class forces rise and fall in relation to wider social, economic and politic situations. This is particularly obvious in the discussion of the French Revolution, when Hallas clearly explains how different forces are able at different points during the Revolution to impose their ideas, but that it takes struggle from below to push the process forward. Hallas writes about the American Revolution thus:

The developing capitalist class in America, for that was what the revolutionary leaders represented was not oppressed by a semi-feudal monarchy. That had been destroyed in Britain in the seventeenth century revolutions. It was oppressed by the 'colonial system' operated in the interests of British capitalists.

This approach allows Hallas to explore, albeit briefly, why the revolution could be labelled as being about freedom, while oppressing so many others. Why it was led by slave traders yet waved the flag of liberty. The interplay between revolution in American and then the French Revolution is fascinating and Hallas shows how the ideas developed across the Atlantic.

While the book is brilliant and is a wonderful grand sweep of revolutionary history, I did have a couple of gripes. I thought it notable that Hallas, in his discussion of the Americas, did not reference the Native Americans or their struggles. He notes that one of the reasons the poor masses supported the revolution was that they were "prevented from getting land of their own". But he doesn't mention that getting this land would lead to genocide by the American state, nor does he have space to mention how the Native Americans were used as a military pawn by the British against the colonial forces. Simiarly I thought that the omission of the Haitian Revolution was strange. Its impact on the French Revolution, on the battle against slavery and ideologically in terms of notions of freedom was immense, and it warranted inclusion. 

These absences noted, there's still an immense amount to learn here. Credit is certainly due to those who were reading through back issues of revolutionary newspapers, found these articles and decided to get them published. I'm finish by noting Hallas' masterful two part discussion of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 which ought to be read by every young socialist in 2024. Let's hope this book gets into their hands.

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Marcus Rediker - The Fearless Benjamin Lay

Of all the people who resisted slavery and fought for its end, Benjamin Lay is perhaps one of the most fascinating and tenacious. Born in 1682, in Essex, he was shaped by an earlier generation's radical religious ideas - Ideas born from the English Revolution. As a Quaker, a labourer and eventually a sailor, he was also shaped by the the radical Atlantic; the politics that arose from the three cornered slave trade between the Africa, the Americas and Europe. This created enormous suffering, but also radical struggle. Within this, Lay ideas developed. His Quakerism gave Lay a enormous dislike of suffering, and a firm eglitarianism. But a trip to the West Indies opened his ideas to the brutal reality of slavery and from then onward Lay, and his partner in struggle his wife Sarah Smith Lay, become radical abolitionists.

Marcus Rediker's book The Fearless Benjamin Lay is aptly titled. Lay was certainly fearless. Repeatedly he punctured the cosy reality of Quaker meeting houses, exposing the hypocrisy of the rich slaveowners who lived a life of luxury while decrying injustice elsewhere. Today it seems inconceivable that Quakers and others could condone slavery, but in his lifetime Lay was denounced and mocked as being mentally ill for his suggestion that slavery should be abolished. It is important to note that Lay went much further than most of his contemporaries, calling not just for the abolition of all slavery, but demanding that fellow Quakers should refuse to have anything to do with it as part of a struggle to destroy the trade.

As Rediker points out Lay was an early proponent of activists tactics that we would today call boycotts and divestment. He refused to drink tea, use sugar, or sit at the table if a slave was serving. These were bold and radical statements for a man of his era. Later he would become vegetarian and his lifestyle changed to reduce as much as possible the suffering of other creatures. His egalitarian ideas were not abstract, but rooted in a personal and political struggle against injustice. 

When Marcus Rediker's book was first published few had heard of Benjamin Lay. During his lifetime he was, however, well known. In part this was a result of his political activism, not least his public theatre. The book opens with an inspiring, and hilarious, account of how Lay disrupted a Quaker meeting by drawing a sword from under his cloak and puncturing a book within which was hidden a bladder of fruit juice. The red juice sprayed all over his slaveowning audience, covering them in metaphorical blood. 

As a result of this struggle Lay became very well known, despite, after his wife's death, living a life as a hermit. On his deathbed he heard news that his struggle against slavery within the Quakers had borne fruit. During the later part of his life, and immediately after his death he was known and celebrated by a growing number of people who opposed slavery. But his life and struggles quickly faded into obscurity. 

Rediker's book unearths much that had been lost of Lay's life and introduced a new generation to his ideas. Lay had been kicked out of numerous Quaker meetings, and its satisfying to know from the introduction to this, the second edition, that recently various groups of Quakers have apologised for this mistake. Rediker traces these internal struggles in details, sometimes losing the reader in the detail. But they are important, not simply for historical reasons. But also because they were important to Lay, who always framed his wordly view through the religion that meant so much to him. Nonetheless, he wasn't held in a straightjacket by those ideas, but used them to demand and fight for change from the very organisation he was part of. 

Reading the book, and noting how Lay's opponents denounced him as "mad". I was reminded that revolutionaries who dream and fight for a different future, are often described thus. No doubt Lay's disability, personal lifestyle and activity fuelled these slurs. But reading Rediker's account of Lay's struggles I was reminded of the quote by the Irish revolutionary James Connolly, who said "The only true prophets are those who carve out the future they announce." How true that was of Benjamin Lay.

Marcus Rediker's books on the revolutionary Atlantic are crucial reading for everyone who is trying to understand how modern capitalism was born from blood and violence, and what that means to us today. But they also celebrate the struggles against that violence, and the fight for a better world. Benjamin Lay is restored through this work to his rightful place among in the list of brave individuals who refused to back down.

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Rediker - Villains of all Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age
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Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is a remarkable book in several senses. The first is it's scope, by which I don't just mean the breadth of US history from 1492 to the late 1990s. What's more remarkable is Zinn's ability to cover the breadth of the historical moment, capturing events at the "top" of society and the interaction with the mass of people at the bottom. The second is its radicalism. Zinn's personal radicalism is well attested (and shines through the book), but Zinn's approach to history itself is radical, and nearly unique in terms of books that have become must reads for those grappling with the long view of US history. As Zinn writes of the struggles that are central to his book:

I don't want to invent victories for people's movements. But to think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should... emphasise new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people shows their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.

Zinn's history is more than a recounting of events, with a special emphasis on history from below, or forgotten struggles. These are there, of course, and Zinn manages to tell these stories with verve, even within the limitations of brevity imposed by the nature of the book. But Zinn's book does more than this because he discusses what was needed for movements to win. For instance he acknowledges the limitations of the trade union leadership, or movements that repeatedly allow themselves to be sucked into the Democratic party at its cycle of elections.

A review of Zinn's book could focus on many different aspects. The opening chapters look at the genocidal policies of European settlers and subsequent US governments against the indigenous people. These are powerful, and Zinn explores the nature of those societies far more than most histories of this ilk. He discusses their different approaches to nature, resources, land and each other. From here Zinn looks at the early settler colonial society and slavery - and emphasises that the modern United States is built on violence and bloodshed. 

But reading history is always coloured by the present, and while it would be tempting to review this book by simply regurgitating Zinn's history in an even shorter format, I wanted to dwell a little on one particular aspect of history which Zinn was intimately connected to - the Vietnam era. This is, of course, interesting and informative. But it has its contemporary relevance with the current wave of pro-Palestine movements in US (and internationally) colleges. The movement bears striking resemblances to the US movement against the war in Vietnam. It is centred on colleges and educational institutions, but has moved out further. The anti-war feeling of the 1960s was, as Zinn painstakingly shows, more predominant among poor and working class people. There are hints of this today, no doubt for the same reasons as in the 1960s. People are sceptical of the role of governments, and angry at the use of resources for war that might be better spent on health, education and wages.  

But the radicalism of the anti-Vietnam war movement has its parallels with radicalism today - and the processes that Zinn highlighted - growing discontent with the establishment, hopes for alternative politics and a rapid growth in anti-capitalist ideas - have only developed further since he wrote this book. The reason for this, he points out, is the role of social movements as well as the inability of capitalism to deliver for ordinary people. When Zinn finished this book the radicalism and mass movements of the 1960s and 1970s had died away. He finished it with hope though, because he expected new movements to arise due to the contradictions of US capitalism. Those movements did develop in the early 2000s with the anti-war and anti-capitalist movements, though too many US socialists abandoned the struggle in that period.

But Zinn's warnings from history - particularly the ability of the system to protect itself from radicalism by using the Democratic Party remain important today. Writing about the Jimmy Carter era Zinn shows how limited his policies were, yet the Democrats were able to position themselves as the alternative, simply by promising a few changes and bringing the leading figures into the Democratic space. Zinn uses an absolutely superb speech by Malcolm X about the Civil Rights March on Washington to illustrate this. The speech is too long to quote here, but Malcolm X finishes by showing how Kennedy's co-option of the movement meant the radicalism of the march was diluted and everyone left "by sundown". As we face an election between Biden and Trump this year, we'll here the siren voices saying that US activists must hold their noses and campaign for Biden to stop Trump. But Zinn shows why this strategy is a disaster. Activists in the US would do well to read the sections of this book on the post-1960s Democrat/Republican consensus again, if only to remind themselves of the pitfalls we face.

It is, of course, possible to nitpick. Every reader of A People's History of the United States will doubtless find something that is missed, or not done justice - that's the nature of such a sweeping history. I do think though that were Zinn writing today he would have included much more on the Native American history in the 15th to 19th centuries, even while acknowledging that he really does do justice to the history after this era, and especially the struggles by Native Americans in the 1970s. I would also suggest that Zinn might have done more about the single issue radicalism of the 1960s - there's very little here on the LGBT+ movement, though Zinn does mention it. It seems odd to this reader that he does not mention Stonewall. Again though, the fact he does talk about these struggles must have been a major breakthrough for a mainstream US history book - and the sections on women's struggles, feminism and the changing US family are fantastic. The ending chapters of the book focus on what Zinn calls the "coming revolt of the guards". Here he suggests that the crisis of US capitalism would force those whose previous roles involved protecting the system - such as university professors - into conflict with it. While he perhaps over-estimates the importance of this, he would no doubt be pleased to see the number of these people who have engaged in struggles recently. 

All in all this really is an indispensable book, a book for activists today, a book for your US travels and a book that illuminates how we got into this disaster, and how we might get out of them. Read it.

Related Reviews

Horne - The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism
Blackburn - The American Crucible
Tyer - Opportunity, Montana
Johnson - River of Dark Dreams: Slavery & Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
Punke - Fire and Brimstone

Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

Some years ago when I first planned a trip to Montana I was gifted Larry McMurtry's book Lonesome Dove as one of the classic works of fiction about the state. Having finally got to Montana and cracking the spine of the huge novel, I learn of course, that the book doesn't really deal with Montana much, apart from, appropriately enough, as a destination.

Instead the book focuses on a fictional, but all too real, cattle drive from Texas just as Montana was being opened up to settlers. Two major characters, Augustus McCrae and Captain W.F. Call lead the drive. They are former Texas rangers, veterans of countless forays against Native Americans and summary executions of horse thieves. Writing it like that reminds one of the sort of people who became heroes in the West. Call and McCrae are old comrades, but it is not really clear if they are friends. Their friendship is perhaps closer to that of soldiers who have fought together, and know each other intimately through shared experiences, but don't necessarily like, or love, the other. Only at the very end does this crystallise out, and by then it is too late.

The cattle drive requires a gang of men to control the cattle, and protect and feed the men. McMurtry's skill is to give each of these multiple characters a decent backstory, and make them all individuals. Some, like the two recent Irish immigrants are tragic, the only black man in the troop - Deets - is a skilled trackers and experienced on the trail, but is once removed from the others by his skin colour. These stories, like that of the Indians in the book, hint at wider social issues in the American West at the time, but the context is really the brief period when the Native American's were all but subdued and the frontier had not quite reached beyond Texas and the Dakota territory. Pivotal moments in the story then deal with the encounters with Native American peoples - sometimes these are extremely violent, and others are tragic. But this novel is not a "cowboy and Indian" trope laden piece of pulp fiction. It is much more nuanced than that.

Indeed, it is perhaps better understood as a sequence of vignettes that take place under the umbrella of a story about a cattle drive. McMurtry doesn't neglect the associated tropes at all - there's a storm, a stampede and a desperate quest for water. But these were, after all, real threats. His skill as an author is to weave in wider tales and story lines that bring everything together - from McCrae and Augustus' back stories, to the characters who make up the cowboys on the drive.

But my real surprise was the strength and depth of the female characters. I wasn't expecting these at all - after all the cattle drives were run by men. But the women are not simply peripheral. McCurtry explores aspects of life for women on the frontier - as sex workers for instance. But he also gives them real character arcs, and their own personalities. These are far more than the romantic interludes to the cowboy's story. They are part of shaping that story. One of the subjects dealt with is the traumatic aftermath of one woman's abduction and violent rape. McMurtry treats this with far more insight and sensitivity than I expected - and avoids a simplistic "happy ending". I was repeatedly struck by how his female characters are rounded - with their own ideas, lives, jobs and demands. Even "bit players" are multidimensional. If McMurtry has one fault it is that he often finishes characters off "off screen" so to speak, ending their story lines - the book is perhaps a little too busy. But for the reader, the novel's ending ties up multiple threads and brings this epic full circle - a most satisfying experience. 

Nonetheless this is an excellent work, a great Western story that does justice to its subject and acknowledging the horrific, violent reality that is American history. As one character notes, America is built on bones.

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Tyer - Opportunity, Montana

Brad Tyer - Opportunity, Montana

Early on in Brad Tyer's book about the town of Opportunity he makes a telling point about the brochures that advertise the tourist mecca of Montana. It is supposed to be an "otherworldly landscape filled with bears and wolves", but both those species and the iconic bison only survive because of direct and regular human intervention. Bison, for instance, are preserved mostly because they are good for eating. The point Tyer is making, is that Montana's nature is not natural, but an artifical construct.

The same is true of many of the rivers. Tyer is a canoeist. He relates to the landscape through the waterways he travels, and Montana's waterways have always been famous. Think of the flyfishing of the film (and story) A River Runs Through It. The film was made far away from the actual location, because that's not natural enough - too many industrial buildings and homes. The story ignores these too. But Montana's rivers have also had an important role in creating the United States. On them steamboats ferried the Seventh Cavalry to their ill-fated meeting with Sitting Bull's forces and, more importantly for the environment, boats moved the copper ore and mining materials in and out of the state. Some of the mineowners might have needed ships to bring in their profits.

The mines have also become repositories for pollution - heavy metals like arsenic and lead, and the muck that falls from the skies. Montana's mines made America, particularly the mines of Anaconda and Butte. But the poisonous waste had to go somewhere, and its ended up in tailings ponds and barely beneath the ground in what has become one of America's largest polluted areas - a superfund site that sucks in millions of dollars to create what is supposed to be a safe environment.

Opportunity is a tiny town, just outside Anaconda. It has become the tragic dumping ground for the legacy of nearly 100 years of copper mining. The people there have various diseases - likely caused by the pollution. There's been a campaign, on and off, by various people to clean it up. But many of the residents, tired of fighting, or worried about their pensions, aren't fighting back. Opportunity, Montana has become the dumping ground in order to preserve the wealthier and more tourist friendly parts of the state.

The Clark Fork River is supposedly being restored to it's "natural sate", but the millions of tons of toxic soil has to go somewhere. And like poor, working class towns from South America to China, Opportunity was chosen. It barely even got mentioned in the presentations about the work. 

Part personal memoir, part traveloge, Brad Tyer's book is an unusual look at the consequences of big business being allowed to get away with murder. The big mining companies made billions in profits, yet have been made to give a tiny percentage back to the communities they ravaged. They were happy to suck the life out of their workers' and kill the very earth around the state, yet they're barely accountable for the horror they unleashed.

Tyer's a great writer, and a decent journalist. He's good with people, and his interviews with locals, industry insiders and environmentalists are fascinating. He's a touch to cynical though - perhaps because he's seen it all go to hell before. I'd like to think we can make the bastards pay. Still, this is a great book for opening the curtain on the real Montana, which I finished a few short hours before flying there to see Butte, Anaconda and the rest.

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