Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  This is, perhaps, exaggeration, but it is exaggeration to the good. A year ago I would never have believed that I could think thus. There is a reason for this outburst: it is not the entire truth, but at least it is the primary part of it. Last week I saw a Russian picture that showed the reclamation of those “wild boys” who were left fatherless after the war to wander, pillage, and drink of evil in Russia. It was a very simple and beautiful picture, the actors all being non-professional and spontaneous, the motif direct, the directing the best. It was no more propaganda for communism than any Hollywood production is propaganda—one of the American movies that demonstrates the fact that a pent-house and a beautiful woman are just around the corner for us all. This Russian movie was more serious in tone because there were in it people who were very much interested in the success of an ideal. (Perhaps the decline of the west is due to boredom with present ideals. Communism would then come as a stimulant in the veins of a spiritless Europe.) As I watched this movie, I grew more and more ashamed and humiliated. The people I saw there did not spend their time thinking, making, or wishing they could make witty remarks, nor yet were they busy with building a comfortable wall around themselves and the rest of the world; neither were they concerned with the roots of German nouns or the facts of false hypotheticals in logic. They were working intensely, unselfconsciously, eating, drinking, anything, working with an enormous gusto that will probably always be denied to me. They roared with laughter at funny things; they spoke with passion and fought with equal passion when they were wronged; they seemed to live with wine in their veins while mine runs water.

  The film he had seen was Nikolai Ekk’s 1931 film Putyovka v zhizn (Road to Life), one of the first Russian movies with sound, the story of homeless youths battling one another in gangs after the Russian revolutionary and civil wars, until they were rounded up and placed in reform schools. Then, after the government failed them, they were taken to the country, placed in communes, and taught trades by sympathetic teachers. It might seem odd that Alan would lecture his father on the importance of a practical education and life among the working classes, considering his summers in the Brazos. But he was in fact attempting to distance himself emotionally from John, and preparing to tell him that he was dropping out of college. When Alan finally informed him that he would not have the scholarship that would allow him to stay at Harvard, John assured him that he was not upset and that Alan could enroll at Texas again.

  At one point Alan wrote him that his father’s affection for him had become frightening. John replied:

  In dealing with me for the last two years you may not [have] kept in mind at all times:

  1. That I have recently taken a lot of severe blows from life.

  2. That pain over sleepless nights and growing sorrow over a long period broke my nerves and left me marvelously and mentally only a shell of what I was.

  3. That the breaking up of my home and constant separation from children is a strain every hour I live.

  4. That as a result of these conditions and others, coupled with constitutional limitations, I have been volatile, moody, seeing lions by the roadside—a poor excuse for a friend and companion.

  As for the direct bearing my state of mind has had as affecting you, I have been unreasonably terrified when something loomed that seemed to becloud your chance of happiness. It was not my wish for your national success, but, as I have told you once, a sort of passion that has dominated me to see you have a chance for healthy and normal mental development that was denied me at a time when youth and desire were joined. And I have as a result have gone off my head and needlessly worried you and worried myself.

  He said he hoped never to be a burden to his son, and wished that his health might improve enough that Alan would never have any “duties” toward him. On the other hand, he admitted, he was down to his last savings, and his creditors wouldn’t wait. “I wish I might find it possible to spend the rest of my life collecting and recording stuff of all varieties—pronunciations, localisms, vernacular, etc., as well as stories and songs.”

  Whatever misgivings Alan had about Harvard and Boston, one reason surely must have been that on May 10, he had joined a rally at the offices of the U.S. Immigration Bureau in East Boston. There had been previous demonstrations in Springfield and Boston protesting the threatened deportation of labor organizer Edith Berkman back to her native Poland. Berkman, nicknamed “the Red Flame” by a Catholic priest opposed to strikers and unionization, had been sent by the National Textile Union to organize workers in the factories of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1931, where she had been arrested for conspiracy to destroy company property, and was now being held in Massachusetts Memorial Hospital because she had been diagnosed as having tuberculosis. Alan was one of a group of thirty-two people who staged hunger strikes or attempted to speak to immigration commissioner Anna C. M. Tillinghast. Later he said that he expected half of Boston to be there, but instead he found half the Boston police force.

  The police told the marchers to disband, but seven refused and were arrested, Alan among them. He had no money for bail, but a classmate, hearing that he had been arrested, showed up at the jail and declared that he’d come for Lomax. The officials assumed that Alan’s bail had been paid and let him go. Soon radio news announced that a radical had escaped from prison in a brilliant plot, but Dean Briggs rushed to the jail to explain the situation and pay his bail.

  Alan was shocked to be taken into custody merely for speaking out, as he had not resisted arrest. He accepted Dean Briggs’s instructions to plead guilty at his court hearing, but he also insisted on arguing that he had a right to try to see the commissioner and that he had done nothing illegal. He was cut off in midsentence and told that he would receive no jail time, but was fined twenty-five dollars for disturbing the peace. Full of anger, that night he spoke from the pulpit at Faneuil Hall about his arrest. Midway through, he realized the farce that surrounded his crusade, and he turned his sermon into a comic anecdote. The Boston Traveler wrote about his arrest, describing him as a Harvard student and a radical.

  Little was made of the matter at Harvard. No disciplinary action was taken, and the incident never turned up in Alan’s records. Still, this arrest would ten years later become the stated reason for FBI investigations when the Bureau became interested in Alan’s political activities.

  A few weeks later John Lomax and John Jr. were visiting friends in Cambridge during the time when Alan was studying for exams, and seeing the problems Alan faced, John later wrote him, “It is ... simple truth that you have helped me most through your fine letters. I have dreamed of you and planned for you and reveled in your manifest growth and progress. And every moment loved you and honored you.” All that Alan had been through that semester was summarized gently: “In your present situation, because of loss of time through your sickness and also because of the exciting diversions you have recently chosen for yourself, you may consider yourself not ready for the examinations in the difficult subjects you chose at Harvard. I believe you will come out all right.”

  John and his two sons drove back to Texas together, arguing all the way, with Alan defending his actions as a matter of free speech and an act of “righteousness,” but his defense only made his father feel worse, Alan recalled. The two sons kept a log of their trip, and the last sentence, written as they approached Dallas, said, “They know nothing of the future, even ten days ahead. They are homeless, jobless, and have no expectations. Let the curtain fall upon this woeful last scene.”

  Alan wrote his sister Shirley that “Communism [written with a flaming “C”] + low grades + monetary deficiency will keep me out of Harvard indefinitely. The same probably goes for any other college.” His final second-term grades were much the same as those from the first: B’s in Greek and philosophy, C’s in the rest. He had already applied to the University of Texas for the Oldright Scholarship in Philosophy, making it clear that he had to have financial support, along with a part-time job, in order to attend.
Tuition at Texas state schools was small, but he still needed living expenses. His application included a proposal for “an extensive study of animism; then trace through the Pre-Socratics into Aristotle’s ‘Logic’ whatever carryover of the animistic point of view there may have been; then with that in mind, begin a study of the development of European logic.” He claimed that it would be valuable because:

  First, it is imperative in the light of the findings of anthropology and the work of Ogden and Richards that an individual, who believes that he can solve problems by thinking about them, investigate the animistic way of thinking, and if he find it different or opposed to the scientific method, discard one or the other. If that is impossible, it will at least be valuable for such an individual to become conscious of this difference in some instances and to know, then, how he is thinking. The value of such self-consciousness is, of course, most obvious in the study of society and ethics; but it may well be valuable to a scientist, too. Second, since Aristotle is more or less the inventor of formal logic, it will throw new light on that subject if he were studied from the point of view of the animistic ideas that were crystallized in the philosophies of his day. Thirdly, it seems to me, will be a most interesting approach to the more moral problems of proof, cause, etc.

  Alan’s application for readmission to Texas was supported by A. C. Hanford, the new dean of Harvard College, who wrote the University of Texas that

  had Mr. Lomax not had pneumonia during his year at Harvard, his grades would have been higher. Mr. Lomax was regarded by those who knew him as a young man of rather unusual ability, originality, and intellectual enthusiasm. He took courses somewhat more advanced than the average sophomore in Philosophy.

  Nothing was said about his politics or his arrest.

  A few months later Alan wrote his stepmother of his time in Cambridge:

  A year at Harvard has just run away from me; I really didn’t treat that poor nine months very well, what with periods of over affection, cold indifference, and anger, and I really can’t blame it too severely for leaving me. We both learned things, mostly what neither of us were very anxious to know; but unless the preachers of the last generation were right, what we learned can do us no harm.

  CHAPTER 2

  Road Scholars

  We were the most powerful nation. Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun? Isolated during the European War, we had begun combing the unknown South and West for folkways and pastimes, and there were more ready to hand.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931)

  As the Depression spread across the world in 1931, the Lomaxes, like every other family, were hit hard. With no money coming in, both sons continued to plead with their father to return to folk song collecting, lectures, and writing until something else came along. Young Bess could live with her sister, Shirley, he could rent out the house, and then he could be free to travel. John Jr. put all his time to working out a lecture tour for his father that would keep the two of them busy traveling through much of the following year. To cut expenses, he suggested that they camp out as they traveled. The income would not be substantial, but it might be enough to draw his father out of his bed and free him to think about things that he might want to do.

  In a burst of enthusiasm John traveled to New York City in June 1932 and convinced the editors at Macmillan that they should give him an advance to edit an anthology of American folk song. A book that drew together all the songs of America was something the times seem to demand; but to also include in it the folk songs of African Americans, properly presented, was an important step in itself. Most white Americans outside of the South did not know this music, and those who did had heard it only through professionally arranged and modified spirituals and folk songs. Lomax proposed not merely to reprint songs from other sources, but with the advance on the book he would also collect them himself in the countryside, record them, and transcribe them accurately from the performers themselves. Macmillan bought the idea, and John began making plans.

  The next day he went on to Washington to talk to Herbert Putnam, the Librarian of Congress, and Carl Engel, chief of the Music Division and the man who oversaw the development of the Archive of American Folk Song. The archive had been created at the Library of Congress in 1928, with money provided by the Carnegie Foundation, Andrew Mellon, and other donors. For its first four years it had been headed by yet another student of George Lyman Kittredge at Harvard, Robert W. Gordon, a popular writer on folk songs who had pioneered in making field recordings, and was now living on grants he applied for through the library. John Lomax thought there might be some way that his own ambitious ideas for folk song collecting could be coordinated, if not actually supported, by the Library of Congress.

  While they were in the capital, John Jr. got an interview with the newly formed Reconstruction Finance Corporation with the help of Senator Tom Connally of Texas, and a month later they offered him a job. Once he moved to Washington, John Jr. took up his father’s cause at the library, suggesting that John Lomax could be of great help to them. The library, meanwhile, had become unhappy with Robert Gordon’s work (or lack of it), his failure to raise funds, and perhaps his drinking, though he continued to work there without pay for the time being. Lomax wanted a similar nonpaying relationship with the library to give him the status necessary to raise funds from scholarly organizations. In return, he offered the library the promise of building up an extensive collection of recordings in the archive, an idea that new recording technology had only recently made possible. In addition, Lomax stressed the importance of African American folk music, and with the rapid rise of black popular and country music on commercial records, it was a suggestion that the librarians found interesting. They may have also felt that Lomax was the ideal individual to carry out this work, since conventional academic musicology seemed unwilling and was perhaps incapable of dealing with folk music.

  John was scheduled to give a lecture at Brown University, and after they left Providence they headed to Cambridge to pick up Alan at Harvard to join them for the next few months of travel. Between mid-June and mid-August they would drive four thousand miles across the country to the Pacific Northwest, then back to Texas, sleeping outdoors every night except when they stayed with John’s friends in university towns. They camped in ballparks, along rivers and lakes, on a racetrack, and in farm fields, sometimes being chased by farmers or bulls, arguing all the way, Alan spelling out the principles of socialism, his father rebutting him, and his brother staying out of it. When John Jr. left them in July, Alan and his father motored on for the next two months, “two bourgeois,” as Alan put it, continuing through the night, pausing at national parks and record stores, where they listened to Beethoven and Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher” (“the latter of which we both liked—tremendously”).

  In the fall of 1932, as wages continued to fall and unemployment rose, bread-lines began to appear in major cities. Thirty-four million people were without income, sixteen million without work. When Alan arrived back at the University of Texas in Austin, his father had arranged for him to live in a large apartment over a four-car garage on an estate near the campus; Alan’s roommate from the year before, Walter Goldschmidt, now a graduate student in anthropology, moved in with him. Bess Lomax recalled visiting for a few days and seeing that “he was living like a hippie. His apartment had a huge Victrola phonograph, and a pile of classical records. A pot of hot coffee was always on the table. Symphonies were playing, and one student or another was always up conducting. Alan liked to argue with anybody who was willing, and he was never one to follow. Each of the students had some kind of radical position or other, but they were all very different and argued for them passionately. Alan’s view was that if you weren’t into something in those days, you were just boring. And above all else, Alan didn’t want to be boring.”

  Each new class challenged him, and he tried on every subject as a possible career—playwright, artist, phys
icist, biologist. He was still deep into philosophy, attempting to find underpinnings for his political passions, and he hid none of it from his father. At one point he wrote him about how he had unified his intellectual and political interests by systematically comparing Plato and Marx. In this same letter he advised his father to “spend your years in folk-song work,” and told him how he might also fit into this plan:

  I think now that, unless I go red, I should like to look at the folk-songs of this country along with you and do some research in that field from the point of view of sociology and anthropology. You and I are peculiarly well fitted for a partnership in this task, it seems to me. You have the practical experience in the field and an instinct for what is genuine and whatnot [sic]. That experience I believe I can soon begin to supplement by making correlations between the ideas in the songs and their social implications. Why not, for instance, study the relations between the content of the Kentucky mountain songs and the mores, popular in that district, the geographical isolation of the folk, the way they carried over the attitude in the English ballads has affected the ideology of the mountaineers. Why not do the same for the negroes in different parts of the country? You and I and Mr. Gordon, who knows his origins, ought to be able together to do some very valuable work in that field.