The House He Lived In: Conversations with Fred Baker

Last June I attended a memorial meeting for film-maker Fred Baker, best known for his documentary “Lenny Bruce Without Tears”. As is customary for such events, others and I spoke about our connections to Fred. I said that when I first met Fred I was struck by his off-the-cuff observation that a revolutionary party could only be built out of a mass movement, something that had taken me over a decade to figure out. I also described Fred as a shining example of America’s bohemian underground that has been around since the days of Walt Whitman, a kind of permanent opposition to the dominant racism and imperialism that might be repressed from time to time but that never dies.

In 1996 I sat down with Fred for a series of videotaped interviews that covered his remarkable life as an actor and filmmaker. Born in 1932, Fred’s life straddles the CP-inspired Popular Front culture of Paul Robeson and the sixties counter-culture. Indeed, people of Fred’s age were a kind of transmission belt between the two periods, never giving in to the soul-destroying 1950s. Singing in leftwing choruses in the early 40s, staging a draftee’s Yossarian-like resistance to the Korean War, performing in musical comedies in the 1950s, launching a career as a pornographer in the 1960s, and making leading edge films in the 70s until his last year on earth—all this was part of his remarkable story.

At the memorial meeting, his partner Beverly mentioned that in the course of organizing his library on behalf of the Smithsonian, she discovered the 1996 videotapes. I became inspired to turn them into a Vimeo production on the Internet, something I am sure that Fred would smile down on from Red Heaven while sitting on the cloud next to Paul Robeson. Getting close to retirement, I hope to find more time for the oral history type videos that a modest camcorder, tools like Final Cut Pro and the Worldwide Web make feasible. The last time I spoke to Fred, I told him that I would like to sit down with him and get him up to speed on what can be done. He died before we could get together but I’d like to think that the DIY sensibility of Youtube and Vimeo was in many ways descended from his pioneering work and other guerrilla film and video makers of the 60s and 70s, including his good friend Frank Cavestani and Frank’s wife the late Laura Kronenberg Cavestani.

From time to time, when I get a nagging feeling that it is a little late in life to become a videographer, I am reminded of Fred Baker who did not let HIV, emphysema, and a host of other illnesses brought on by old age get in the way of his own productivity. Weeks before his death, he was all fired up about a documentary he was doing on striped bass fishermen on the Hudson River nearby his son’s home in New Windsor. Fred was a fireball up until the day his heart finally stopped ticking. At the memorial meeting his son-in-law described going to a jam session with Fred on a Saturday afternoon, where he could play drums. Drumming had been a passion of his since the age of 8 when Pearl Primus, an African-American dance counselor at Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, a leftist summer camp, introduced him to the instrument. His son-in-law said he practically had to run to keep up with Fred on the sidewalk, even as Fred was forced to lug an oxygen tank on wheels behind him for his emphysema.

As pleased as I am with the video, that only scratches the surface of Fred’s remarkable life. These resources help to complete the picture:

Fred’s blog

Fred Baker Film and Video

On the Sound, a jazz dance film by Fred Baker

Movie People: At Work in the Business of Film, edited by Fred Baker and Ross Firestone

Finding Fred Baker: a film thesis project by Daoud Abu-Baker

My article on Fred Baker

My review of “Assata”, Fred’s last film

Acting on the Web: a website by Frank Cavestani for aspiring actors. I met Fred through Frank, whose connections to the both of us are covered in the video.

Garin Baker online gallery of fine art: Socially aware and artistically powerful works by Fred’s son.

Preliminary notes on the New Deal

One of the most common complaints from professional liberals about Obama is that he has failed to deliver on the hopes they had for a new New Deal. After reading Alan Brinkley’s slim (116 pages) but informed biography of FDR, I can assure them that there’s not really that much difference between the two Democratic Party presidents. While not quite in the same category as the chapter on the New Deal in Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the USA, it certainly borders on damning with faint praise.

Even before he was elected, FDR was displaying some rather reactionary tendencies, although it should be added completely in line with the standards of the time (no doubt the same flaw demonstrated by Obama in spades.) Appointed by Woodrow Wilson to the post of assistant secretary of the Navy, FDR initiated a crack-down on gays in the area around the large naval base at Newport, Rhode Island. Enlisted men were assigned to entrap sailors and others (including a prominent Protestant clergyman). A scandal erupted over the excesses of the action and a Senate investigation led by Republicans rebuked FDR in 1921. Ah, the good old days…

As I have already mentioned in my article on the Bonus Army, one of FDR’s first major pieces of legislation in 1932 was a deficit-hawk Economy Act that cut benefits for veterans and government employees, ignoring the advice of the left.

The next piece of legislation in the First Hundred Days favored rich farmers over the poor ones. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was supposedly designed to aid all farmers but in the hands of the Farm Bureau Administration, it tilted in favor of the agribusinesses of the day. Farm income for them grew by 50 percent over the next three years, but the dispossession of small farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers continued and even accelerated. Especially hard-hit were Black farmers in the South who were targeted by the Dixiecrats. If you think of all this in terms of David Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession, it all made perfect sense. If Ford, GM, US Steel et al needed wage slaves, where else to get them except from the Deep South—either Black or white poor farmers.

In terms of Ford, GM and company, help arrived in the form of the National Industrial Recovery Act that created the National Recovery Administration. The goal of the NRA was to create trusts of the largest corporations that would establish price floors and check deflation. While there were some progressive aspects (elimination of child labor, maximum workweek hours of 35-40, and creation of Section 7(a) that would enable industrial trade unions), the main result was economic stagnation since the NRA was based on the assumption that overproduction of manufactured goods was at the root of the Great Depression. Here’s Clarence Darrow denouncing the NRA:

Not surprisingly, as Brinkley admits, FDR “faced growing disillusionment from the vast pool of the unemployed, and even from members of his own administration, who felt he was ineffectually improvising and was in danger of failing.”

Like Obama, FDR was rather loath to raise taxes on the rich despite rhetoric to the contrary. The Revenue Act of 1935 raised taxes on income over $50,000 but the bill had little impact on increasing government revenues or on “soaking the rich”. The bill was largely symbolic and helped to craft his image as some kind of leftist. In a campaign speech in October 1936, FDR spoke about welcoming the hatred of the rich but really did little to deserve it. His faux progressivism did help him beat Alf Landon, however, by a landslide.

Although his victory gave him a progressive mandate, FDR decided to move in exactly the opposite direction. Goaded by Henry Morgenthau, his secretary of the treasury and the Tim Geithner of his age, Roosevelt decided to balance the federal budget. The consequences were disastrous. Unemployment went from a low of 14.3 percent in 1937 (!) to a 19 percent in 1938 while the GNP declined by 5 percent.

He reversed himself in 1938 but by that time the New Deal was virtually finished. Brinkley states, “It did not end the Great Depression and the massive unemployment that accompanied it; only the enormous public and private spending for WWII finally did that.” In other words, he concurred with Harry Magdoff.

Needless to say, Alan Brinkley’s book—despite its overall integrity from a liberal standpoint—is totally insufficient. I read it to get oriented to a research project that might culminate in a book if I can ever discipline myself to stick to a single topic for more than a week.

Basically there has never been a book-length Marxist critique of New Deal liberalism to the best of my knowledge. The best things out there, besides Zinn, is an essay by Ronald Radosh titled “The Myth of the New Deal” that was a chapter in a book he co-edited with libertarian Murray Rothbard titled A New History of Leviathan. There’s also an article by Barton Bernstein in a book titled “Towards a New Past”–a collection of radical articles on American history that I plan to read before long.

About the best thing out there is Art Preis’s “Labor’s Giant Step” that is focused on the creation of the CIO and that exposes FDR’s “plague on both your houses” politics that implicitly favored big business. Preis was a leader of the SWP and a first-rate journalist and working-class scholar.

I have all this material at home, as well as some other useful items on the WPA, etc.

I believe that it is absolutely necessary for the left to take on New Deal mythology and smash it once and for all. As is the case with Kemalism in Turkey and the PRI in Mexico, FDR’s liberalism is a kind of foundational myth for our own powerful bourgeois party crafted in progressive terms.

Even if this does not turn into a book, I will be filing reports on what I find out in the months to come.