UniversalMonk

If you lived in mid-19th century Portland, chances are you would have been familiar with an eccentric-looking character who roamed the dusty streets with a bundle of his radical newspapers. Jeremiah Hacker was strikingly tall, with a big bushy beard. He carried an ear trumpet because he was nearly deaf and wore an old drab coat covered in patches because he felt “required to clothe himself according to plainness and simplicity of truth.” Often on the edge of poverty, he lived on bread and water in a boarding house on Cross Street, where he wrote his paper, The Portland Pleasure Boat, every week on his knee, assailing the institutions of government, capitalism, slavery, prisons and organized religion.

Although Hacker had devoted readers throughout the country, historians have largely ignored him. Fortunately, Maine journalist Rebecca M. Pritchard has breathed new life into Hacker’s iconoclastic writings in her wonderful new book, Jeremiah Hacker: Journalist, Anarchist, Abolitionist.

Born to a large family in Brunswick in 1801, Hacker was deeply influenced by his Quaker upbringing, which shaped his pacifism and disdain for the hierarchy of organized religion. In the midst of the Second Great Awakening, Hacker joined scores of itinerant preachers who flocked to the Maine countryside. But unlike the others, his aim was to convince people to leave churches, not to join them. He believed that God “dwelleth not … in temples made with men’s hands, but in man” and that “pure and undefiled religion … visits the sick, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and leads man to live inwardly and outwardly unspotted from the world.” As Pritchard notes, Hacker was also fiercely anti-government, believing, like 20th century anarchist Emma Goldman, that all governments rely on violence, so he refused to support them by voting or paying taxes.

He had no love for wealthy capitalists either. “While the wives and daughters of mechanics are toiling over their wash tubs, or cooking over hot fires, the wives and daughters of capitalists are murdering pianos, sighing over novels, sauntering with coxcombs or searching for the latest fashions; and all these things cost money, and this money must by some kind of hokus pokus means, come from the pockets of the producing classes,” Hacker observed in an 1849 essay. “If therefore they can wring an hour’s labor each day from each man in their employ, it will aid in defraying their pious expenses, and in supporting them in luxury and idleness.”

When Hacker launched the Pleasure Boat in 1845 by selling his one good coat to pay the printing costs, the Industrial Revolution was beginning to draw independent artisans and subsistence farmers from the land and into wage labor in the cities and towns. Fearing the impending loss of their economic independence, Maine workers formed associations to call for land reform and the elevation of the producing classes over monopolists, land speculators and bankers. Mainers also experimented with cooperatives and utopian socialist ideas as female textile workers organized the first strikes in Saco and Lewiston for better pay and working conditions. After visiting some of these factories, Hacker poured his outrage into the pages of the Pleasure Boat.

“There are hundreds of young females shipped from this State every year to the factory prison-houses, like cattle, sheep and pigs sent to the slaughter,” he wrote in another 1849 piece. “Every steam boat and car that leaves this State for Massachusetts carries more or less of these victims to the polluted and polluting manufacturing towns where they are prepared for a miserable life and a horrible death in the abodes of infamy.”

Hacker also visited jails and was appalled by the conditions he witnessed, particularly the sight of children in cells with adults. To prove they could be reformed, he bailed boys out of jail and placed them with farmers and a sea captain to learn their trades. He was also the first voice to call for a reform school, which eventually became the Boys Training Center, most recently renamed Long Creek Youth Development Center, in South Portland.

Hacker couldn’t be pigeonholed into one reform group because he was critical of all of them. He opposed slavery, but scolded abolitionists for not boycotting slave-made goods like he did. He chastised peace activists for paying taxes to the war machine. He was an ardent teetotaler, but opposed Maine’s landmark 1851 prohibition law because he believed in persuasion, not coercion. Hacker supported gender equality, but didn’t think anyone should vote.

Many of Hacker’s ideas seem quaint in retrospect. His solution to poverty, crime, alcoholism and wage slavery was to just grant everyone tracts of land where they would “be no longer the landless slave of capital, driven about by landlords, and robbed by shylocks.” But as Pritchard notes, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862, granting land to 2 million Americans, and we still have basically the same societal ills that Hacker observed. Hacker failed to grasp the power of capitalism to globalize, or as his contemporaries Marx and Engels put it, “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” In spite of his flaws, many of Hacker’s critiques of our institutions still ring true today, even if his solutions are hopelessly naive.

Hacker’s most entertaining writings were his takedowns of prominent figures. He described temperance crusader Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland, as “a mad dog with a firebrand to his tale.” And he despised lawyers, declaring them “no more fit to enact laws for a nation of working men than a lady’s bustle is fit for a dairy-woman’s cheese-hoop, or a dandy’s cane for a laborer’s crowbar.”

Hacker was Maine’s original alt-journalist. The Pleasure Boat contained no ads, which gave him the freedom to “hack” away at disreputable businesses that advertised in other Portland papers. His favorite targets were “quack” doctors selling fake miracle cures. After one doctor threatened to sue a printer for printing Hacker’s constant tirades against him, Hacker just found another printer, defiantly writing, “If I live a while longer, there shall be a free press in Portland, if I have to beg rags to procure it!”

In the end, it was Hacker’s fervent opposition to the Civil War that did him in. Incensed readers cancelled their subscriptions en masse in 1862. He would revive his paper in various forms, but they were short lived. After the Great Fire of 1866, Hacker moved to the progressive community of Vineland, New Jersey, to farm and write. He lived for another 30 years before passing at the ripe old age of 94.

Pritchard’s book is quite short (it was adapted from her master’s thesis), but it’s an excellent primer on an influential figure who deserves more attention. And her descriptions of old Portland through Hacker’s eyes — the tenements, the grog shops, the free blacks, sailors, street children, impoverished widows and destitute elderly couples forced to continue working — provide a vivid context for his righteous anger.

“A cruise on The Pleasure Boat was no pleasure if you were the subject,” notes historian Herb Adams. “Hacker was deaf — quite literally — to both pleasure and pain, and let critics of his paper bellow themselves hoarse while he stood silently by.

“He was a true lone eagle,” Adams continued, “happy to keep a shrewd eye and a sharp pen pointed at our world of sin that never quite came up to his expectations. And there was plenty of sin in his time, as he’d say — slavery, alcohol, taxes, politics and people who would not listen, especially to him. He must have been a fascinating neighbor, an exasperating friend, and a terrible foe.”

May have been written today. The more things change, the more things stay the same!

Chicago, February 27, 1934

Dear Carl: Your letter of February 13 was quite a surprise and illuminating, to learn that you had arrived at the same conclusions that I had some years ago: that is, that Anarchism has not produced any organized ability in the present generation, only a few little loose, struggling groups, scattered over this vast country, that come together in “conferences” occasionally, talk to each other, then go home. Then we never hear from them again until another conference is held.

Do you call this a movement? You speak of “the movement” in your letter. Where is it? You say, “I just feel disgusted.” I have been for a long time.

Anarchists are good at showing the shortcomings of others’ organizations. But what have they done in the last fifty years, you say. Nothing to build up a movement; they are mere pipe-dreamers dreaming.

Consequently, Anarchism doesn’t appeal to the public. This busy, practical world cares nothing for fine-spun theories—they want facts, and too, they want a few examples shown.

They talk about cooperation. You state that you have been trying to get the four little excuses for papers to cooperate to get out one worthwhile publication, but you can’t succeed. . . .

Anarchism is a dead issue in American life today. Radicalism has been blotted off the map of Europe. The Vienna horror-slaughter is too shocking to realize. The worker is a mere appendage to the capitalist factory. Machinery has eliminated him. Robert Burns said: “O God, that men should be so cheap, and bread should be so dear!”

Radicalism is at a low ebb today. We are living in strange times! Despotism is on horseback, riding at high speed. The worker is helpless; he has no voice in his mode or method of life—he just floats along on the tides of ill times.

I went to work for the International Labor Defense (ILD) because I wanted to do a little something to help defend the victims of capitalism who got into trouble, and not always be talking, talking, talking. When the little work that is now being doled out [is finally doled out], what then?

As ever, fraternally, yours

Lucy E. Parsons

Skinheads Who Try to Do Right Thing : Not all youths sporting close-cropped hair and wearing combat boots are neo-Nazi thugs, and some are even organizing to clean up their racist, violent image.

*By DAVID HALDANE - July 31, 1989 * Times Staff Writer

Subdued in a manner belying their image, about 50 “skinheads” gathered at a San Fernando Valley park on a recent Saturday to listen in respectful silence to the words of one of their leaders.

“Wear your (identity) with pride,” said Todd Schwartz, glancing at his yellow armband. “You got to know who and what you are.”

Meet the self-described anti-racist skinheads, a breed apart from the better-known, hard-core variety. While they share many of the same interests of other skinheads, they also claim to pursue racial harmony and pacifism.

Indeed, certain elements of these youths’ appearances made them readily identifiable as partisans of the youth subculture whose name of late has become almost synonymous with neo-Nazism. Nearly all of the boys and many of the girls sported short-cropped hair. Most wore combat boots. Many wore odd-colored suspenders.

But scattered among what has come to be widely regarded as such easily recognizable symbols of defiance were some surprises as well. More than a third of the youths in the park were black, Latino or Asian. And they sported yellow armbands marked with the letters SHARP, an acronym for Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice.

“Real skinheads aren’t racist,” said Iby Miranda, 16, a dark-skinned Latino high school student who favors short hair and black army boots. “Those who are are just bald punks.”

Amid the barrage of media coverage depicting skinheads as neo-Nazi thugs, this new voice is quietly attempting to gather strength.

Members of these groups claim there are hundreds of anti-racist skinheads in Southern California. To make their points they are meeting in parks, picketing at concerts, distributing leaflets, recruiting members, holding rallies, publishing newsletters and generally conducting an aggressive grass-roots public relations campaign to get the word out that not all skinheads are racist.

“We’re providing the kids with an alternative,” said Schwartz, 21.

A U.S. Marine with the rank of lance corporal based at Camp Pendleton, Schwartz--who is Jewish--is the West Coast coordinator of SHARP, one of the largest and most visible of the loosely organized skinhead groups that call themselves “two-tone” to describe their racially integrated membership. Other such groups spotted in Southern California, police say, have included United Skins, the Mickey Mouse Club, the Mods, West Coast Front, Brotherhood Skins, Mad Skins and Anti-Racist Action.

“The Nazis offered them a group,” Schwartz said, “now we’re offering them a group on the other side.”

Roots in ‘60s England

The association between skinheads and racist sentiments goes back at least 20 years to the British working-class neighborhoods in which the gangs of mostly white youth first began appearing. One of their favorite activities back then was beating up on Third World immigrants.

Except for a general identification with the white working class, however, the violence never seemed attached to any particular ideology. That began changing a few years ago when American skinheads started mingling with organized neo-Nazi groups. And indeed, in the last three years law enforcement officials in 24 states have reported violent attacks by hard-core skinheads, whose number they estimate at about 3,500 nationwide.

But two-tone skinheads say they are getting a bum rap. The vast majority of skinheads, Schwartz and others insist, are not neo-Nazi sympathizers at all.

Largely nonviolent, these young people simply consider themselves nonconformists and embody a sort of ethic of individualism, they say. By focusing on the neo-Nazi skinheads, Schwartz said, the media have made life precarious for the others, many of whom have become the unwitting objects of ridicule and hostility that occasionally erupt into attacks on the skinheads.

One ordinarily quiet Long Beach neighborhood, for instance, has been plagued all summer by violent altercations that local skinheads claim are provoked by more conservatively dressed youths ranging from surfers to preppies. The teen-age vigilantes, the skinheads said, attack them, wrongly assuming that they are Nazi sympathizers.

Such anti-racist claims are finding the support of a Southern California psychologist who studied skinheads after counseling some of them for doing poorly in school. After conducting random interviews with more than 150 skinheads over several months at public gatherings in San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles, psychologist Robert Butterworth said he found fewer than 10% who seemed to hold white supremacist views.

“I got the sense that they are very angry toward the media,” said Butterworth, who has offices in Downey and Los Angeles. “They feel that nobody is listening to their side.”

Many of them are simply young people who have a tremendous need to identify with their peers during the transition from childhood to independence, Butterworth said. “We are making them more dangerous than they really are,” he said. “They have a hard edge, but I don’t see them as hard on the inside.”

Law enforcement officials say they haven’t yet seen any evidence of the “softer” side of skinheads. “The only skinheads who come to our attention are the ones that are (racist),” said Detective Michael Brandt, hate-crime coordinator for the Los Angeles Police Department’s Devonshire Division.

After outgrowing the private San Fernando Valley garage in which it began meeting a year ago, SHARP--whose meetings have reportedly been attended by as many as 200 youths--recently moved its “headquarters” outdoors to the nearby park. Although the majority of members are male, there are also a significant number of female members who play equally active roles.

Schwartz estimates national membership at about 2,000, including 500 in seven California chapters. About 40% of the membership, he said, consists of skinheads who are members of racial and ethnic minorities.

But firm numbers are elusive, Schwartz admits, because the organization--like the life style it represents--remains unstructured.

“It’s all informal networking,” said Schwartz, adding that meetings are announced by word of mouth and activities financed by special collections. “SHARP is more of a belief than an organization.”

While that belief officially shuns violence, many SHARP members say they will fight back against attackers. “We’re passive aggressors,” Miranda explained. “We won’t go out and commit a violent act, but we will defend ourselves.”

That seemed evident in May when the group picketed an appearance at The Country Club--a Reseda concert hall--by the Cro-Mags, a band known to attract Nazi skinheads. Supported by a large crowd, some SHARP members got involved in a series of scuffles that drew coverage by several local television stations. And a protest at the Glendale Masonic Lodge resulted in cancellation of part of a conservative Bible study conference that the protesters considered racist.

The atmosphere during the recent meeting in the park, however, was decidedly nonviolent. Conducted by Schwartz and Greg Lee, a black Granada Hills high school student who oversees the Los Angeles/Valley chapter, the meeting included the announcement of a proposed anti-graffiti project, discussion of an upcoming camp-out at Lake Elsinore and an impromptu birthday party for Schwartz.

Afterward the young skinheads, reveling in their camaraderie through a childlike game of tag, spoke of the dilemma they face.

“I believe in this,” said Paula Lazear, 15, a Reseda high school student of Filipino and French descent. “We’re getting screwed both ways. We’re getting jumped by ‘white power’ and jumped by people who think that we’re ‘white power.’ ”

Dan Jones, a 20-year-old Marine from Camp Pendleton, boiled his philosophy down to a simple equation. “Skinheads are pro-American,” he said. “Nazis don’t support America.”