Flickr (Kheel Center)
This Croatian-American story might begin in many places, but for me, it begins at the Wisconsin Historical Society manuscript collection. Years ago I read about Herb March, organizer of packing house workers in Kansas City and Chicago of the 1930s-40s. I drank it in with the enthusiasm of a young scholar of the Left.
A Great Vision: A militant family’s journey through the 20th century. By Richard March. Brooklyn: Hardball Press, 340pp., $15.00.
Imagine my delight, then, at learning that Herb March’s son, Richard, has released a book, A Great Vision, reveling in the saga of generations of a Lefty family. Richard March himself is a public figure—a folklorist of Wisconsin’s polka tradition and storyteller of the glories of life among the Czechs, Poles and other immigrant communities in Wisconsin’s supper clubs of the 1930s and 1950s.
The Croatians were well known for direct action in the 1910s labor movement, as likely as not to be Wobblies. Like the Slovenes, they organized themselves in clubhouses that offered social activities, featuring the Tamburiza bands (a stringed instrument unique to Croatians), keeping alive their historic past in the Balkans.
They were socialists in large numbers (later on supporting Yugoslavia’s Josef Broz Tito for resisting the Nazis while other nationalities waited for the West or the Red Army to arrive). Their immigrant communities endured in the United States by providing services and a reminder of old world ties. Richard March’s mother, Jane, worked at a Croatian-language paper, leaned Red, and joined her husband in organizing packinghouse workers in 1930s Chicago. Some of their closest comrades were to be fabled, like Vicky Starr, featured using the pseudonym Stella Nowicki in the 1973 documentary film Back of the Yards, as well as the better known 1976 documentary Union Maids. The accomplishment of a multi-racial union movement in “Packingtown” stands among the grandest successes of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
March’s father was of the Jewish immigrant world—the famously left-leaning Brownsville, Brooklyn, where socialist meetings and women’s housing-strike actions were often conducted in Yiddish. After two name changes, his father adopted “March” as a defense against anti-Semitism in Kansas City in the 1930s. He was a Communist and not shy about it, although perfectly willing to risk expulsion by telling the party leadership to drop dead when their tactical suggestions fit the local situation badly. Among ordinary Communists of the 1920s, who understood little of the party in-fighting and cared even less, Herb March was an autodidact, a learner who never stopped learning.
The rich text of March’s book draws on interviews he did with his father, as well as on work that his mother did for a writing class in 1971. He adds his own memories, from childhood onward, with some wonderful material on a family facing the 1950s Red Scare, with the usual FBI agents lurking outside the door of their home.
Richard March chronicles his own trajectory as well, leaving Chicago with his parents as the stockyards closed, and becoming part of California culture. Of course, the California New Left had plenty of “Red Diaper” babies, and a special place for singing radicals. Richard became one of those guitar-strumming revolutionaries who moved the crowds beyond the capacities of the orators. In a seemingly rushed or over-condensed final chapter, he describes managing to stay clear of the draft by relocating to Wisconsin, and after several other shifts, returning to California to become a jack-of-all-trades folklorist.
His upbringing, no doubt, clued him in to how folklore works; why it is engaging to ordinary people even two or three generations from immigrant-ethnic origins. He became, in his own small way, a media guru, explaining the lives of working people to themselves. And he is beloved for it, not least by Polka enthusiasts. The book then is both a tribute to the "great vision" of the Left of the 20th century and a lesson to the younger activists of the twenty-first on the essential role of everyday folk culture in building a successful struggle for a better world.
Paul Buhle, a retired labor and oral historian, produces radical comics. His latest is Johnny Appleseed (Fantagraphics).