On 2010-07-30, at 3:49 PM, c b wrote:
> Mike Gold
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Gold
Mike Gold (April 12, 1893, New York City – May 14, 1967, Terra Inda, California), was the pseudonym for Itzok Isaac Granich. He was a lifelong communist and a combative left-wing American literary critic. One of three sons born to a family of Jewish immigrants named Granich on the Lower East Side of New York City, he reportedly took his pseudonym from a Jewish Civil War veteran he admired for having fought to "free the slaves."[1] During the 1930s and 1940s, writing as Michael Gold, he was considered the "Dean of U.S. Proletarian Literature."
[…]
===================================================== Another Jewish CP'er from that generation, my dad's cousin, whom I first met and used to visit in NYC as a young 60's radical until political differences drew us apart. This LA Times story was drawn to my attention a few years ago. I hadn't know the circumstances of Bill's death. I never knew him as "Wild Bill", a moniker he may have adopted or which was conferred on him later. The article neglects to mention his role in organizing New York cabdrivers prior to his leaving for Spain. There's also a surprising comment in it from his former wife, Mary, doubting he was a party member, which he most certainly was, as this correspondence with Michael O'Riordan, the late leader of the Irish Communist Party and his friend and fellow combatant on the Ebro front, clearly indicates - http://www.irelandscw.com/ibvol-MoR1939.htm)
Column One Life and Death of an Activist STEPHEN BRAUN, TIMES STAFF WRITER Los Angeles Times April 13, 1991
'Wild' Bill Gandall wanted his passing used to rally the faithful. It also offers an elegy for the dedicated political adventurers of a faded era.
The crowning moment of "Wild" Bill Gandall's final campaign found him on his hands and knees, crawling up the steps of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles in protest against the Persian Gulf War.
All around was chaos, the kind of confusion the 82-year-old had survived as a Marine in the Nicaraguan bush and a recruit in the Spanish Civil War. Knocked to the ground as demonstrators surged toward the building's doors, Gandall dragged himself past nightstick-wielding federal police. At the top of the steps, the old man steadied himself with his cane and spoke briefly to reporters before he was hustled away and handcuffed.
"You only die once," he said.
Two months later, William P. Gandall was found dead in his wheelchair in a sunlit Long Beach hospital dining commons. Once a museum piece of an anti-war movement weakened by solid American support for the Gulf conflict, Gandall is now being offered up as a movement martyr.
Relatives and activists accuse the U.S. Federal Protective Service of hastening Gandall's death by roughing him up and failing to provide proper medical attention during the Jan. 16 demonstration--claims police deny and a coroner's autopsy contradicts. The brutality alleged is a far cry from the Rodney G. King beating, which has brought national attention to such law enforcement behavior. Instead, protesters say, it amounts to the failure to treat an old man with the care his age required.
Even as Gandall's death rallies peace activists desperate to reinvigorate their cause, it also serves as an elegy for a fading American archetype. Gandall was a real-life counterpart of the tough, committed characters found in the novels of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, political adventurers who reached their prime in the troubled decade before World War II. He lived life full-bore, fighting with the Marines in Nicaragua in 1926 and against Fascists in Spain in 1936, enduring the demoralization of the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s--quarreling and rabble-rousing all the while.
If Gandall's last act of protest seemed almost a suicidal risk for an elderly man with a heart pacemaker, it becomes clearer in the context of his past. He came of age in an era with little moral or political ambiguity, a foot soldier in a movement whose leftist idols had yet to be tarnished and whose enemies came without redeeming human shades of gray. Compared to the educated, issue-oriented activists who have dominated national protest since the Vietnam War, Gandall and his generation were blue-collar internationalists who mapped their lives by activism.
"I don't think we will see their kind again," said Harvey Klehr, an Emory University political scientist and historian of the American left. "In the 1930s and the 1940s, the left had the power to elicit tremendous commitment. These people marched off to war and lost their lives, all in the name of anti-fascism. It's hard to imagine that kind of fervor again."
On his Long Beach hospital bed, Gandall asked his daughter, Kate, a New York film student, to carry on. "He told me to make the most out of his death," she said.
So Kate Gandall has begun laying groundwork for a lawsuit against federal police. Anti-war organizers put out calls in leftist circles for witnesses. Last Sunday, a day after the old soldier was buried in a Riverside veterans cemetery, 100 people--former Spanish Civil War soldiers, unionists, communists and war resisters--sprawled out in the vaulted chapel of a Unitarian church near MacArthur Park. They were there for Gandall's memorial service--a rite they videotaped to energize activists in other cities.
The church's main stage was draped with the gold and red banner of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the battalion Gandall and 3,300 American adventurers joined in 1936 to fight against Gen. Francisco Franco's army in the Spanish Civil War. Folk singers in long dresses trilled anthems from that conflict. Only a few octogenarian brigade members who fought with Gandall knew the words.
Steve Orel, a bearded organizer who was host of the memorial, called the dead man "Brother Bill," an old union title as musty as the mourners' worn velvet seats. "This is not just a memorial service," Orel said, "but also a protest to a system that would beat an 82-year-old man."
[…]
Over his life, Wild Bill Gandall witnessed more than his share of vicious behavior. As an 18-year-old U.S. Marine in Nicaragua, he had even dished it out. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Gandall joined a force of 3,000 Marines who invaded Nicaragua in 1926 to crush a rebellion by Augusto Sandino--the namesake of the country's current Sandinista party.
For decades, Gandall was haunted by memories of participating in gang rapes, burning villages and standing by while soldiers tortured and disemboweled rebel prisoners. He left the Marines in 1928, soon after an incident in which he joined a group of drunken soldiers at a party in Managua's main cemetery, cavorting with prostitutes and scattering the bones of the dead.
"It was a terrible desecration," he said, his final summation of an experience that did not immediately radicalize him, but sowed seeds of guilt that eventually transformed him.
Spain was easier on his conscience. It was a natural destination for a union man who roamed the country during the 1930s like labor's Johnny Appleseed, organizing elections and fomenting strikes. At the battle of Ebro, Gandall was hit by shrapnel and saw a close friend die. Pinned down by gunfire, he listened to the man's fading screams, then crawled forward to find the dead man's body covered with ants.
World War II was Gandall's last great conflict--and his undoing. Posted in London with the Army, his only battles were with his commanding officer, one Capt. William E. Jenner, who apparently was put off by Gandall's politics. A decade later, in August, 1954, Gandall was summoned to Washington to appear before a Senate committee investigating communist subversion. Its chairman was his old nemesis, Jenner, then a Republican senator from Indiana.
Gandall had never told his wife, Mary, whether he was a party member. She remains doubtful, convinced that "he was never much of a joiner." He took the 5th Amendment before the committee, a tactic that cost him his new career as movie publicist.
Unable to save himself, Gandall took after Jenner. Pacing as the inevitable questions arose, Gandall shook his finger at the Indiana senator, announcing that on duty as a military policeman, he often escorted Jenner, "tight as hell," from pubs and brothels.
"I remember it, and there is many a sergeant that saw you drunk and disorderly," Gandall shouted as Jenner hammered his gavel. "We saw you with your hair down. We did not call you the 'captain of the night' for nothing."
Full: http://articles.latimes.com/1991-04-13/news/mn-170_1/7