“The embodiment of all we hold dear”

davislifeYesterday we met Angela Davis, who in August 1970 supplied guns for a courtroom raid and hostage-taking incident in Marin County, California, that was intended to free her boyfriend, a felon then confined at Soledad State Prison. The incident ended in several deaths, and when the authorities became aware of Davis’s role, she was charged with murder, conspiracy, and kidnapping. Instead of surrendering to the police, Davis – who at the time was an active member of both the Communist Party and Black Panthers – became a fugitive from justice.

During her months underground, the FBI put her on its Ten Most Wanted List. She became a household name. Some American Communist leaders wanted to expel her from the Party and brand her a terrorist; but they lost out to other Party honchos, who decided to give Davis the Party’s full support and publicly identify her as a noble crusader against – and tragic victim of – racist, sexist, and capitalist oppression. 

American activist Angela Davis, shortly after she was fired from her post as philosophy professor at UCLA due to her membership of the Communist Party of America, 27th November 1969. (Photo by Lucas Mendes/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Davis in 1969

Davis was finally tracked down and arrested at a New York motel in October 1970. When she went on trial in February 1972, she was represented by the American Communist Party’s general counsel. At the same time, the Party, in league with its sister parties in the West and under the direction of the Kremlin, spearheaded a high-profile worldwide movement promoting sympathy for her “cause” and calling for her release.

This movement won the support of a number of useful celebrity idiots. The Rolling Stones dedicated a song, “Sweet Black Angel,” to Davis; John Lennon and Yoko Ono also recorded a song about her, “Angela.” (It began: “Angela / They put you in prison / Angela / They shot down your man / Angela / You’re one of the billion political prisoners in the world.”)

Among Davis’s fervent supporters were Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. In the USSR, thousands of people signed petitions demanding her freedom; Soviet children mailed postcards to President Nixon pleading with him to let her go.

In the end, Davis was acquitted, despite mountains of incriminating evidence. Ron Radosh later compared the verdict to that in the O.J. Simpson murder trial; so did Roger Kimball, writing: “How did she get off? In part, for the same reason that O.J. Simpson got off: celebrity, edged with racial grievance mongering.” What’s more, the jury was heavily compromised: one of its members was Mary Timothy, an activist who would later become romantically involved with Communist Party official Bettina Aptheker, a friend of Davis’s and founder of the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners.

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Davis in Cuba with Fidel Castro

Following her acquittal, Davis flew to Cuba, a country that she hailed as a model of socialism and racial harmony. In 1975, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn criticized her for having refused to speak up for prisoners in Communist countries. In 1977, she expressed enthusiasm for Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple cult in Guyana, over 900 of whose members, in one of the signal events of that decade, would die in a 1979 mass murder-suicide. Also in 1979, Davis went to Moscow to accept the Lenin Peace Prize. Russian writer Vitaly Korotich, who met her there, later said that she was “a useful tool for the Brezhnev government, used to bolster Communist ideals and speak out against the West during the Cold War.”

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Davis in Moscow, 1972

During those years, the media followed Davis everywhere she went and covered her public activities and statements extensively. An opponent of all American military ventures, Davis gave a thumbs-up to the Soviet invasions of both Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain, she received honorary doctorates from two institutions in Warsaw Pact countries, Lenin University and the University of Leipzig.

davis3In 1980 and 1984, she was the Communist Party’s candidate for Vice President. In the 1980s she taught Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University; she was later hired by the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she was a member of both the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies departments. The current profile of Davis on the website of UC Santa Cruz includes the following sentence: “Professor Davis’s long-standing commitment to prisoners’ rights dates back to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment.” An interesting way of referring to the fact that Davis supplied Jonathan Jackson with those guns. 

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Davis speaking at the Brooklyn Museum

Today, she is hailed as a hero of feminism, of black civil rights, and of social-justice causes generally. In 2012, Ron Radosh noted that the Superior Court building in Washington, D.C., was hosting “a photo exhibit celebrating renowned black women” – and that one of those honored was none other than Angela Davis. Then, in early June of this year, came the news that Davis had won the Sackler Center award, presented to women at the top of their fields. At the ceremony, Elizabeth Sackler, chairwoman of the Brooklyn Museum, said that Davis was “the embodiment of all we hold dear” and that her very name was “synonymous with truth.” In fact, the award was only one more deplorable example of the contemporary elevation to heroic status of enemies of freedom and champions of totalitarianism.

Rex Reed, Trumbo fan

trumboAs we saw yesterday, several prominent reviewers have filed notices about Trumbo – the recent biopic about blacklisted Stalinist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo – that are so utterly uninformed by even the slightest historical awareness that we can’t help wondering: where were these idiots educated? How did such ignorant people get top-flight movie-reviewing gigs? How old are they? Could it be that they’re just too young to understand just what an evil phenomenon, and what a real threat, Soviet Communism was?  

That last question, to be sure, doesn’t arise in the case of Rex Reed, the septuagenarian gossip columnist, movie reviewer, and (back in the day) frequent talk-show guest.

NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 27: Rex Reed attends the "Preston Bailey Flowers" book release party at the 21 Club on October 27, 2011 in New York City. (Photo by Mark Von Holden/Getty Images)
Rex Reed

Reed, one of Trumbo‘s most enthusiastic champions, gushes over its portrayal of what he calls – and please read this carefully – “a postwar decade when America was nervous about finding a Communist under every bed, deceived and misinformed by alarmists like then-Senator Richard Nixon, who mistakenly preached the ignorant message that Communism was the enemy of democracy.”

Now, let’s take this nonsense in sequence. First, about “alarmists”: surely one of the lessons (however unintentional) that any alert viewer takes away from Trumbo is that it wasn’t “alarmist” at all for anyone to worry about Communist influence in Hollywood. No, there may not have been a Communist under every bed (and nobody seriously thought that there was), but there were, as it turned out, a hell of a lot of convinced Stalinists writing movies that would be seen by millions of people around the world. Radical leftists insisted passionately, repeatedly, that the Hollywood Ten were innocent; in the end, it turned out that every last one of them was, indeed, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. (And that’s not just an expression: each of them had a card testifying to his membership in the CPUSA.) 

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Reed in the 1970 movie Myra Breckenridge

As for Reed’s statement that it was “ignorant” for Nixon, or anyone, to suggest that “Communism was the enemy of democracy”: how to reply to such a breathtaking claim? How could Reed –who, born in 1938, was alive during most of the history of the Soviet Union – actually put such a sentence to paper? Granted, Reed has never been known for his brilliance; on the contrary, he’s always been something of a preposterous nitwit, preoccupying himself with the accumulation and dissemination of inane celebrity scuttlebutt.

But for heaven’s sake, the guy is pushing 80. Has he really learning nothing all these decades? Has he been so busy attending screenings and going to glitzy showbiz parties and interviewing vapid actresses that he’s managed to miss out entirely on even the most significant world events of the day? Is his whitewashing of Communism an example of staggering foolishness? Of staggering dishonesty? Of some unfortunate mental debility?

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The real Trumbo with his wife, Cleo

Or could it be that Reed – who, like Yoko Ono and the late Lauren Bacall, lives at the sumptuous Dakota on Central Park West – is himself, like Trumbo, a limousine Commie? (Though we’ve never paid much attention to Reed, we’ve always thought of him as a bubble-headed lightweight whose mind never actually entertained a political idea of any stripe; but we’ll have to take a closer look at his oeuvre one of these days to see if we’ve been missing something.)

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Cranston, with Diane Lane as Cleo

By the way, here’s what Reed says at the end of his review: “Hopefully, Trumbo will broaden the knowledge of young audiences today that remain ignorant about Hollywood’s darkest past.” The tragedy of Trumbo, alas, is that will fill the heads of untold numbers of improperly educated young people, both today and in the future, with dangerous falsehoods about Stalinism and its adherents.

Then there’s Steven Rea. We’ll get around to him tomorrow.