Mickey Z

Cool Observer

Friday, October 21, 2005

My new book...and the salt of the earth

Every now and then, a more-radical-than-thou lefty might proclaim that my new book, 50 American Revolutions You’re Not Supposed To Know, is good...but adds nothing new to the mix. Perhaps those steeped in Chomsky, Zinn, Arundhati, Ward Churchill, and Democracy Now will find 50AR to be more reminder than revelation...but that’s not my only target audience.

50AR, I believe, can be a powerful refresher course for any subversive...but it’s an even better gift in terms of introducing new ideas to the un-converted (especially in the post-Katrina environment).

If you know someone who still uses the phrase “liberal media,” get him a copy of 50AR.

If you know someone who still thinks the U.S. is in Iraq to spread democracy, get her a copy of 50AR.

If you know someone who still believes that terrorists hate us because we’re free, get him a copy of 50AR.

If you know someone who thinks it’s useless to resist, get her a copy of 50AR.

Okay, that’s my weekly pitch…
50AR can be ordered here: http://tinyurl.com/dxk4y

For those who’d prefer a little taste before they buy, I hope you like it salty. Excerpted from 50AR:

Name the best-known early 1950s film with a union theme? Easy. That would be On the Waterfront. But Waterfront was not the early 1950s film with a union theme that none other than Noam Chomsky called, “one of the greatest films ever made...couldn’t get it out of my mind for weeks.” That would be the sadly neglected Salt of the Earth (1953).

(Watch clip here: http://tinyurl.com/exurq)

Made by a group of McCarthy-era, blacklisted filmmakers, Salt of the Earth tells the story of New Mexico zinc miners—and their families—struggling against their bosses for a better life. The film is based on the real-life struggle of MMSW Local 890, which went on strike against the Empire Zinc Corporation in 1950.

“Shortly after the strike had begun, an injunction prohibited men from walking the picket lines,” writes Tony Pecinovsky in People’s Weekly World. “Women soon replaced their brothers, sons, husbands and fathers – an action of major significance, especially since corporate America had little tolerance for people of color, especially women of color, standing up for their rights.”

Narrated by a character appropriately named Esperanza, the wife of a striking miner, Salt of the Earth featured a cast made up almost entirely of those who actually participated in the strike and is a feminist movie before such a thing had a name. Writing in Cineaste, Ruth McCormick states that no other film “deals as basically and as thoroughly…with the issue of women’s liberation, from the politics of housework to the myth of male supremacy, the ways in which class society divides the sexes by creating false antagonism between them.”

Equally as impressive is the manner in which revolutionary film was completed against all odds. Production began on January 20, 1953 and the Hollywood Reporter soon announced: “H’wood Reds are shooting a feature-length anti-American racial issue propaganda movie.” The outcry carried all the way to Congress where Donald Jackson, a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), promised: “I shall do everything in my power to prevent the showing of a communist-made film in the theaters of America.” Rosaura Revueltas, the woman who played Esperanza, was deported to Mexico during production on a trumped-up immigration charge (her passport hadn’t been stamped upon entering the U.S.).

“The film’s director, Herbert Biberman, spent six months in jail for refusing to testify before HUAC,” adds Pecinovsky. “Several key personnel on the film were found in contempt of Congress when they refused HUAC’s badgering as well. The film crew was barred from laboratories, sound studios, and other facilities normally used by filmmakers. No Hollywood labs would process the film and the projectionist’s union refused to show it.”

Salt of the Earth made its theatrical debut in March 1954 and won the International Grand Prize from the Academie du Cinema de Paris in 1955. Like the characters in the film and the real-life workers those characters were based on, the filmmakers had emerged triumphant in what Pecinovsky calls a story “about racism, sexism, chauvinism, red-baiting, union busting, censorship and courage; the courage of ordinary people, workers and filmmakers, standing together in solidarity.”