“You talk to your enemies … sit down and talk” ─ nonviolence peacemaker Mairead Maguire

MAIREAD CORRIGAN
MAGUIRE

 People talking together realize they can solve their problems without killing

Excerpt by Carolyn Bennett

From Amitabh Pal interview with Mairead Maguire

As a person of peace, she travels all over the world: the Congo, Argentina, Iraq (before and after the 2003 war), Afghanistan, Israel and the Occupied Territories. “When I saw the situation on the ground,” Mairead Maguire said, “how the Palestinian people were suffering, I was absolutely horrified. Then I started going on a regular basis.

 

“

I was very interested in the West Bank and the nonviolent movements there, which you never hear much about. Palestine has a very strong nonviolent movement, and we started going every year to support people in Palestine who were calling for a nonviolent solution and an end to the occupation.”

MAIREAD CORRIGAN MAGUIRE (1944- ): Northern Irish global peace activist and co-founder of Peace People (Community of the Peace People), a grassroots movement of Roman Catholic and Protestant citizens dedicated to ending the sectarian strife in Northern Ireland. She is a Nobel Peace laureate (received in 1976 with Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown) and joint founder  (2006 with fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates Shirin Ebadi, Jody Williams, Wangari Maathai, and Rigoberta Menchú) of the Nobel Women’s Initiative.

Others too
Called for dialogue
Syria

Talking, determined nonviolence resolves conflict

“We have to start from the fact that there are always alternatives to violence,” Mairead Maguire said in her interview with Amitabh Pal.

“

We mustn’t start off with the idea that there’s only militarism, invasions, and occupations.

“We really have to look: What are the alternatives here? That’s what we were saying in our community in Northern Ireland when we were faced with death threats, when our cars were destroyed, and paramilitaries were after us.

“We were saying, ‘no’ to bombing and para-militarism.

“That [bombing and para-militarism] wasn’t justice. That wasn’t solving our problem. We were moving around in circles for seven years and people were dying every day. It was getting worse. So, we had to find another way of trying to solve our problems.

You talk to your enemies. You sit down and talk to them and say, ‘Why are you so angry?

Where’s your problem coming from” And we’ll work this out together.’

We were not against anybody; we were for life, for respect, for change.

  

“We mobilized for six months. Our approach was to try to bring down the fear in the community and to come together to say, ‘How do we build a Northern Ireland identity?  ‘How do we work together to have a bill of rights and shared political structures?’

“We went to communities that had a great deal of violence and set up discussions and provided platforms for people who otherwise would be committed to the armed struggle or to the loyalists.

“

We had them coming together on the same platform to talk. That was very important—step by step—for bringing together people to realize that they could solve their problems without killing each other.

“We had rallies throughout Northern Ireland every Saturday, and also throughout Ireland, in England, and in other parts of the world. The point was to try to bring down the fear between the two communities.

“

We were trying to see how we could connect.

“That worked because in the first six months of the peace movement there was a 78 percent decrease in the rate of violence. And it never went back up again.”

M

artin Buber (philosopher b. 1878- d. 1965) said:

“Love is responsibility of an ‘I’ for a ‘You’: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling.”

“[While] dialogic is not to be identified with love, love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other ─ the love remaining with itself is [as a] Lucifer [Diablo].” 

There are three principles in [the being and life of humankind]: the principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. 

The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow[s] is that I do not say what I mean and I do not do what I say.

Sources and notes

“Mairead Maguire” Amitabh Pal, Progressive March 2013 Issue with Mairead Maguire

http://www.progressive.org/mairead-maguire-interview

MAIREAD CORRIGAN MAGUIRE (1944- ): Northern Irish peace activist and co-founder of Peace People (Community of the Peace People), a grassroots movement of Roman Catholic and Protestant citizens dedicated to ending the sectarian strife in Northern Ireland. Nobel Peace laureate (1976 with Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown), joint founder  (2006 with fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates Shirin Ebadi, Jody Williams, Wangari Maathai, and Rigoberta Menchú) of the Nobel Women’s Initiative.

http://www.pressenza.com/npermalink/nobel-peace-laureate-says-nox

http://www.peacepeople.com 13.4.2012

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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U.S. government, government-sanctioned corporations shadow, surveil, threaten global citizens

Icelandic leader speaks for freedom 
Re-reporting, editing end comment by
Carolyn Bennett

Birgitta Jónsdóttir

She is a Member of Iceland’s Parliament as well as a poet, writer, artist, editor, publisher and activist. Birgitta Jónsdóttir organized “Art against war” where a number of Icelandic artists and poets came out to protest the war in Iraq. 

She set up the first Icelandic online art gallery in 1996 for the Apple Shop in Iceland and has participated in several international projects related to writing and activism including “Poets against the War”, “Dialogue among Nations through Poetry”, and “Poets for Human Rights”. She also edited and published the international books The World Healing Book and The Book of Hope. She is founder of Beyond Borders Press and Radical Creations and part of the International Network of Parliamentarians for Tibet (INPaT)

B

irgitta Jónsdóttir was an active volunteer for WikiLeaks and had an important role in the making and

Member of  Icelandic Parliament
Birgitta Jónsdóttir

production of the “Collateral Murder” (a U.S. airstrike in Iraq) video. She is the chief sponsor of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative and has advocated making her homeland a haven for press freedom.

On January 7, 2011, she announced on her Twitter page that she had been notified by Twitter that it had been served with a subpoena by the U. S. Department of Justice demanding information about all her tweets and more since November 1, 2009. [Greenwald, Salon]

In the Icelandic Parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir is Member of the Parliamentary Review Committee on the SIC [Report of the Special Investigation Commission (SIC): The Special Investigation Commission (SIC) delivered to Althingi on April 12, 2010 had been established by Act No. 142/2008 by Althingi, the Icelandic Parliament, in December 2008, “to investigate and analyze the processes leading to the collapse of the three main banks in Iceland.”] report since 2009; Member of the Committee on the Environment since 2009; Member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs since 2009; Member of the Icelandic delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly since 2009.

She was elected to the Icelandic parliament in April 2009, her district Reykjavík South Constituency, to serve on behalf of a movement aiming for democratic reform beyond left and right party politics. Formerly representing the Citizens’ Movement and The Movement, Birgitta Jónsdóttir now represents the Pirate Party. She calls herself an “activist inside and outside the system” and is quoted saying, 

Being political is having opinions. 

Every person has the opportunity to change the world.

T

oday on Democracy Now, she said, before the Iraq War started, she had participated in antiwar demonstrations “with millions of people from around the world in an attempt to stop the war from happening. I knew that this would happen.”

Video “Collateral Murder”

“To have it actually in my living room in front of my eyes, the true horror of war and all these war crimes that I had heard of but I’d never seen felt to me as important enough to take a little bit of a risk,” Birgitta Jónsdóttir said; “so I did a lot of the background investigation. I organized the Icelandic volunteer team. I pulled out the photos that we put on the website. And I was the coordinator for the YouTube account.”

Wikipedia note: Baghdad airstrikes of July 12, 2007, were a series of air-to-ground attacks conducted by a team of two United States Army AH-64 Apache helicopters in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah (the district of New Baghdad in Baghdad) during the Iraqi insurgency and U.S. military occupation of Iraq. The attacks received worldwide coverage in 2010 following the release of 39 minutes [13 minutes were onboard footage from one of the two AH-64 Apache helicopters involved in the incident] of classified cockpit gunsight footage. 

Reuters had unsuccessfully requested the footage of the airstrikes under the Freedom of Information Act in 2007. 

The footage was acquired from an undisclosed source in 2009 by the Internet leak website WikiLeaks, which released the footage on April 5, 2010, under the name “Collateral Murder.” Recorded from the gunsight Target Acquisition and Designation System of one of the attacking helicopters, the video shows three incidents and the radio chatter between the aircrews and ground units involved. An anonymous U.S. military official confirmed the authenticity of the footage.

 

Long train of abuses

U.S. threat to freedom of expression

“I think it is time,” she said, “to stop the witch hunt on people who are involved with journalism and whistle blowing. It is of deep concern to me considering that this country, the United States of America, had one of the most significant trials in the world in relation to freedom of expression and speech when [American publisher, poet, painter, liberal activist] Lawrence Ferlinghetti went on trial a long time ago to defend just these values.”

Call government to account

In light of the constant abuse of rights and persecution of reporters and whistle blowers by U.S. government officials and related agents and as she and other global and U.S. citizens have been (are being) threatened by this government and agents, Birgitta Jonsdottir asks, “…Why isn’t the U.S. government itself held accountable for probing into the lives of people …?” It is “very serious,” she says, “that they probed into my life. They … went into my home, through the Internet door, and I’m a Member of Parliament.”

S

uch actions amount to international incidents. The International Parliamentary Union has put forward a very harsh, unanimously adopted parliamentary proposal in which “parliamentarians are encouraged all the time to work across nations. …” And a Member of Parliament subjected to the U.S. tactic of persecution and probing surveillance means, she says, that “Everybody who writes to me is now on the desk of the FBI.… What is the difference between what [hacker] Jeremy Hammond did and what the U.S. government did? 

Remember truth teller
Journalist
Anna Polikovskaya

“… I am not the subject of a criminal investigation,” she says, “so what gives them the right to go into my personal stuff?”

“What gives [the global intelligence company] Stratfor the right to go into Julian Assange’s personal stuff or anybody that’s associated with WikiLeaks?” she asks.

O

nce rights are taken away or by an indifferent people relinquished to an oppressive regime, it is hard to impossible to get them back. Rights taken today are lives taken today for exposing the truth of events about which we have the right to know and on which to act as citizens in a representative democracy. This isn't fashion or celebrity stuff. This is, as MP Birgitta Jonsdottir says, very serious indeed. 

Sources and notes

“Icelandic Lawmaker Birgitta Jónsdóttir on Challenging Gov’t Secrecy from Twitter to Bradley Manning,” April 8, 2013, http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/8/icelandic_lawmaker_birgitta_jonsdottir_on_challenging

The Official Website of Birgitta Jonsdottir, “Her political views are not expressed on this website since she does not think of politics as something beyond her everyday life,” http://this.is/birgitta/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birgitta_J%C3%B3nsd%C3%B3ttir

“Collateral Murder,” http://www.collateralmurder.com/

“Collateral Murder,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_murder#Leaked_video_footage

WikiLeaks obtained the video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. “WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material. We have spoken to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident. WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.”

Jeremy Hammond and Judge Preska

Jeremy Hammond is a political activist and convicted felon from Chicago charged in a criminal complaint with crimes relating to the December 2011 hack of Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor).

Wikipedia: In November 2012, after being held eight months without trial, Jeremy Hammond was denied bail by Judge Loretta A. Preska (Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York) who warned that Hammond could face life imprisonment for a Stratfor leak. Judge Preska’s husband worked for a client of Stratfor and his emails were among the leaks as well as the password to his email account.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Hammond

Stratfor

Wikipedia note: Stratfor: ‘The Shadow CIA’ ─ Barron’s once referred to it as ‘The Shadow CIA.’ Strategic Forecasting, Inc or Stratfor is a global intelligence company founded in 1996 in Austin, Texas, that has published a daily intelligence briefing since 1996. Stratfor’s rise occurred with the release of its “Kosovo Crisis Center” during the 1999 NATO airstrikes over Kosovo. Time magazine, Texas Monthly, and other publications promoted it. It enhanced its visibility with the tragedies of September 11, 2011. Its subscriber list was confidential and the company’s publicity list includes Fortune 500 companies and international government agencies. Media outlets CNN, Bloomberg, the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times and the BBC used the company as an authority on strategic and tactical intelligence issues. Barron’s once referred to it as ‘The Shadow CIA.’

In early 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing over 5 million of the company’s email messages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratfor

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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President wastes, wars; neglects U.S. suffering historic loss

Government that likes the “idea” of being “leader of the free world” but fails to work for redress 
Comment, re-reporting by Carolyn Bennett using sources

U.S. President Barack Obama returned to Washington this week Thursday from a Democratic fundraising tour in San Francisco that included appearances at four high-dollar private fundraising events to the consternation of “Washington Republicans and progressive activists alike.”

Environmental protection
failure

In the midst of his wars across Asia and domestic structural disestablishment and economic depression, the U.S. head of state

…appeared Wednesday at a $5,000-a-head cocktail reception at the $5.8 million Sea Cliff, San Francisco home of investor and environmental activist Tom Steyer and his wife Kat Taylor, a philanthropist who serves on the board of directors of organizations including the Insight Prison Project, which runs ‘emotional literacy’ and ‘yoga’ programs inside San Quentin Prison.

…spent Wednesday night at the Intercontinental San Francisco hotel, where the 2,000 square foot presidential suite has a starting rate of $3,500 per night.

 

Unemployed in Detroit 

…appeared at the Atherton hills home of Medley Partners Managing Director Mark Heising, where tickets cost $32,400, and then the Atherton home of Levi-Strauss heir John Goldman, where tickets ranged from $1,000 to $20,000.

The Common defense and general welfare of the United States languishes as the U.S. president luxuriates conspicuously in wastefulness:

Labor force participation rate in the United States was 63.3 percent in March ─ its lowest level in three decades.

Economist Heidi Shierholz said the government’s latest reports touting lower unemployment was inaccurate in that it shows not that people are “employed”; but that people have been dropping out of the labor force.

“The number of people working fell nationally by 206,000 even as the number of unemployed fell by 290,000. Those two statistics reflected that the civilian labor force had shriveled by nearly half a million people.”

Separate records

“The low labor force participation rate,” Shierholz said, “is not because of demographic factors such as retiring baby boomers; but because of the lack of demand for workers.

“I

f the 4 million people the Congressional Budget Office estimates dropped out of the labor force had been looking for work, the unemployment rate would be 9.8 percent.” 

Mixed results, disestablishment

Foreign relations failure
Endless wars
Endless domestic neglect

The federal government cut 14,000 jobs in March ● 11,700 in the U.S. Postal Service.

State governments added 9,000 jobs ● Local governments subtracted 2,000 jobs in the public schools.

  

Durable goods production (including 800 auto manufacturing jobs) added 4,000 jobs ● Manufacturing took a net loss of 3,000 jobs

Food makers cut 1,600 jobs giving food manufacturing and clothing a big hit ● Textile and apparel companies cut a combined 4,100 jobs.

The construction industry added 18,000 jobs ● Retail trade cut 24,100 jobs (15,300 jobs lost at clothing stores).

Health care providers added 23,400 new workers ● Temporary services added 20,300 jobs.

The Globe and Mail, referencing a separate Labor Department survey of households, reported that the U.S. labor force “declined by 496,000 in March”; labor-force participation rate decline of 0.2 percentage points to 63.3 percent ─ the lowest since May 1979.

This dire picture of jobless figures, the article said, “argues against complacency about the U.S. recovery.”

Y

et in the face of an “economy grinding to a halt” and labor force participation having plummeted to its lowest rate since 1979, the president returns to a high-rollers’ trail of political campaigning. No wonder demonstrators and even some officials in Washington were outraged at the president’s “Bay Area junket of wasteful hobnobbing with billionaires.”

This president seems to like the “idea” of being U.S. president more than doing the job of head of state; and his failure of leadership is telling in every sector and issue in need of serious redress:

U.S. abroad

…foreign relations, environmental protection, worker protection and employment, immigration, civil liberties and human rights, nonviolence, to name a few of his failings.

And he goes on prancing and posturing, making speeches and vacuous promises, waging wars on the world’s peoples and; in consequential neglect, waging war against the people and institutions of the United States.   

Dwight David Eisenhower
U.S. soldier and
34th U.S. President

The 34th president of the United States said, “We must be strong at home if we are going to be strong abroad. We understand that. 

So we want to be strong at home in our morale or in our spirit.

We want to be strong intellectually, in our education, in our economy and, where necessary, militarily.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense,” President Dwight David Eisenhower warned, “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” 

Sources and notes

“Obama’s California fundraising trip irks left and right,” April 5, 2013,

http://dailycaller.com/2013/04/05/obamas-california-fundraising-trip-irks-left-and-right/

“Hiring rate slows in March Still unemployment dips to 7.6 percent” (Ann Belser, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), April 6, 2013, http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/us/hiring-rate-slows-in-march-682327/

“U.S. jobs report doesn’t necessarily signal spring swoon” (Kevin Carmichael Washington — The Globe and Mail), April 5 2013, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economy-lab/us-jobs-report-doesnt-necessarily-signal-spring-swoon/article10802541/

The U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 7.6 per cent from 7.7 per cent, but only because the labor force declined by 496,000 in March, according to a separate Labor Department survey of households. The labor-force participation rate declined 0.2 percentage points to 63.3 percent, its lowest May, 1979.

Overall, the March jobless figures argue against complacency about the U.S. recovery. They don’t argue for giving up on it.

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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Contemporary leadership defiles Lincoln legacy of Liberal Democracy

 Virtues of democratic leadership: perseverance, self-limitation, humility

Excerpting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

Director of the Civil War Era Studies Program and Professor of the Civil War Era Allen Guelzo spoke last month with Tom Mackaman of the World Socialist Web Site. This is some of what Dr. Guelzo had to say about the character and thoughts of America’s sixteenth president.

Slavery the retrograde institution poisoning the republic ─ keeping the American republic from realizing its full potential

E

verybody in the race of life ought to get a fair start and a fair chance ─ this was the star by which Lincoln navigated and the best example was his own life.

Enlightenment

“Lincoln saw in the Southern elite a defection from Enlightenment bourgeois politics toward aristocratic rule.” The complexion and structure of the plantation aristocracy of the Old South ─ similar to Prussian Junkers (19th and 20th centuries’ pejorative designation for a member of the landed nobility in Prussia and eastern Germany) who were not great aristocrats but squirearchy ─ Lincoln saw himself arrayed against that.

“Lincoln sees American democracy as a last stand, what he calls the last, best hope. And if this goes down, we may so discredit the whole notion of democracy that no one will ever want to go this way again, and so this is the test.

It’s a test of whether or not we’ll have this new birth of freedom, if we’ll finally shuck off these last husks of aristocracy and move forward in the direction of democracy.

Add caption

That for him is the vital issue.

The Civil War was “a test [of] whether this nation or any other nation so conceived can long endure. Is democracy self-destructive? Are the aristocrats right: That the only way you’ll ever have order in society is to let them run things; That you cannot put rule into the hands of ordinary people because they’ll botch it from selfishness, egotism, and stupidity?”

Union-Slavery debate

“People today often want to separate slavery and say that Lincoln was interested in preserving the union and not in destroying slavery.

“That gets it exactly wrong. The two are as knotted together as a rope because the only union worth preserving is a union that has abjured slavery.

“So for Lincoln to get rid of slavery is to purge America of the aristocratic poison. He once said that slavery was the one retrograde institution that was poisoning the American republic, keeping the American republic from realizing its full potential.…”

Incompatible with Enlightenment

“Slavery says that there is a category of people that can never be allowed to rise, that cannot improve themselves no matter how hard they try because they will always be slaves.

“It’s very much the classic disjuncture between the Enlightenment and feudalism.

“

Feudalism talks about people being born with status, and everyone comes into this world equipped with a status. This status is either free or slave, serf or nobility, elect or damned, whatever.

“For the Enlightenment, people come into this world armed with rights; and

[t]he ideal political system is the system that allows them to realize those rights, to use those rights in the freest and most natural fashion possible.

From Declaration of Independence

Lincoln was not exaggerating “when he talks at Gettysburg about the country being founded on a proposition, that’s what he means ─ that he did not have a political thought that did not flow from the Declaration of Independence ─ and specifically that all men are created equal.”

B

y equal, Lincoln means “equality of aspiration. He spoke those words about never having had a political thought which did not flow from the Declaration in February of 1861, outside Independence Hall. He believed that what the Founders meant, what the Declaration of Independence meant, was that everybody in the race of life ought to get a fair start and a fair chance. That was the star by which he navigated, and the best example he could offer to anybody was his own life.

 

“[Lincoln] had come up from grinding backwoods poverty and by dint of his own effort, intelligence, and gifts, had risen to more than a modicum of success ─ not only success in financial terms, but success socially. In every respect he was his own confirmation of his theories.…”

Democratic leadership

Lincoln combines “virtues of democratic leadership.” As opposed to aristocratic leadership, which honors valor, physical prowess, and dominance, “democratic leadership is more about perseverance, self-limitation, and humility. What we see in Lincoln is a collection of the virtues we think are most important in a democratic leadership. 

“[Lincoln] presided successfully over this incredibly critical moment we call the Civil War. He kept the union together. He defeated the Confederacy.

Anyone who sits down for a moment to think about what the alternative would have looked like—a successful breakaway Confederacy—and how that would have flowed downstream has to be with impressed with what Lincoln was able to save us from.

There is in the end no intrinsic reason why the Southern Confederacy should not have achieved its independence. And if they had, that would have had serious implications for the later role the North American continent plays in world affairs.

Imagine a North American continent as divided politically and economically as South America.

This would take the United States off the table as a major world player, and then what would you do with the history of the 20th century?

“

…In the American context Lincoln imparted to liberal democracy a sense of nobility and purpose that it has not always had in other contexts. He makes democracy something transcendent, and especially at Gettysburg where he talks about the nation having this new birth of freedom.

“…At the end of the day this is what the Civil War is about—it’s about the preservation of liberal democracy. In the 1860s the United States was the last Enlightenment experiment that was still standing.”

Sources and notes

Professor Allen Guelzo

“Understanding Lincoln: An interview with historian Allen Guelzo,” World Socialist Web Site,

April 3, 2013 (Copyright © 1998-2013 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved), http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/03/guel-a03.html

Allen Guelzo spoke with Tom Mackaman of the World Socialist Web Site in his office at Gettysburg College on a Saturday morning in March.

“A large academic conference was being held that weekend at the college entitled “The Future of Civil War History.” Gettysburg, in southeastern Pennsylvania, was the location of the bloodiest battle in the Civil War, and the city’s college is now one of the leading centers in the study of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln.

During the period addressed in this interview, the late antebellum and the Civil War, American capitalism and its political representatives, led by Lincoln, played a revolutionary role, confronting the reactionary leadership of the American South and its system of slave labor.

Within a decade of the end of the Civil War the class struggle between the triumphant capitalist order and the working class had supplanted the earlier struggle between ‘free labor’ and slavery as the decisive issue in American history.

Professor Allen Guelzo

Allen Carl Guelzo is Director of the Civil War Era Studies Program and Henry R. Luce III Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College

Born 1953 in Yokohama, Japan, Dr. Guelzo took his academic credentials, M.A. and Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania

Most recent publications (Allen C. Guelzo)

Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (2012)

Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (with Michael Lind, 2009)

Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions, 2009)

Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (2008)

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004)

Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Library of Religious Biography) (2003)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_C._Guelzo

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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America’s pastime contextualized in social history ─ Ackmann’s Toni Stone Story

Toni Stone

First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in 

Negro League

Editing by Carolyn Bennett

From a 2011 Detroit Metro Times opening game interview with author Martha Ackmann

Women and Social Change

Martha Ackmann

“I write books about women who have changed America,” Ackmann told Sandra Svoboda. “When I went about searching for a topic for my next book, I knew I wanted to write about sports because I think sports are a great window for looking at American culture.…”

C

urveball, Ackmann said, is the story of Toni Stone and the times in which she lived; and besides her story, it “is the story of Jim Crow America, specifically through the lens of Negro League baseball.” She said she “wanted to talk about Jim Crow conditions that Negro League players faced when they traveled around the country. Certainly there were Jim Crow restrictions all over the country but particularly in the South,” she said, “so I talked about what would happen when players tried to get a meal in Washington, D.C.…”

"National pastime"

Always in her books, she said, “I am writing stories about social change in America; in particular, about how women have faced inequity especially when they have a very uncommon dream. I have tried to tell that story in a way that I hope is going to be interesting to a broad audience so they learn something about American women’s history, they learn something about sports, and they also learn something about the struggles for equal rights in our country.”

Remarkable woman and athlete

Toni Stone “was a phenomenal athlete. As a kid she played every single position. She played a lot of outfield; and by the time she entered her late teens to early 20s, she was a second-base player.… She played in Briggs Field (in Detroit, later named Tiger Stadium), one of the many big, big stadiums like Yankee Stadium and Chicago’s Comiskey Park. She loved playing in big stadiums and Briggs wasn’t too far from her hometown (St. Paul, Minnesota). Detroit in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s was a pretty great place to be playing Negro League ball. There was a lot of support and there were always packed games where [Stone] felt she got a lot of exposure.”

 

Discrimination, disrespect

Traveling with teams, Ackmann said, “Sometimes when (Stone) pulled up to a boarding house or a hotel in the (U.S.) South, the 28 (male members of the team) would get off the bus and she would be the only woman.

The proprietor would look and say, ‘You must be a hustler or a prostitute,’ and direct her to the nearest brothel. Toni eventually had no other choice. She would have to stay there.

She said: ‘These were good girls.’

I think (Stone) saw something of the outcast in them as she felt herself a marginalized figure.

Surprisingly to her, the good girls gave her a place to stay and laundered her uniform and sewed padding into the chest of her uniform so she could take hard throws to the chest, and eventually she built up a network of brothels where the ‘girls’ would meet her, sometimes in a car, and take her to the brothel; and show her the respect that she didn’t find elsewhere. 

Toni Stone

Wikipedia note: Toni Stone (b. July 17, 1921; d. November 2, 1996) became one of the first women to play as a regular on a big-league professional team in 1953. In 1985 she was inducted into the Women’s Sports Foundation’s International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame. In 1990 she was included in two exhibits at the Baseball Hall of Fame, one on ‘Women in Baseball’ and another on ‘Negro League Baseball’. In 1993 Stone was inducted into the Women’s Sports Hall of Fame as well as the Sudafed International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame. In 1990, Stone’s hometown of Saint Paul, Minnesota declared March 6 ‘Toni Stone Day’. Saint Paul also has a field named after Toni Stone located at the Dunning Baseball Complex.

C

urveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League contains tough truths.

Martha Ackmann's
Curveball

“I tried to get at the truth, Ackmann said, “and sometimes the truth cuts … both disturbing and fascinating ….  I think it’s very important to (chronicle) that kind of documentary evidence to try to be a witness to history — especially a history that not a lot of people know, about a woman who wanted to play America’s game.”

Toni Stone “… was a wonderful storyteller.” She “had a great flair for language and knew what the good stories were,” Ackmann said. “I started (Curveball) long after she had passed away but one of the things I did was that I tried to find every single audio or video tape that I could possibly find to hear the tenor and quality of Toni’s voice; but more importantly (to hear) how she related things.…”

Had the book been researched before Stone died, Ackmann said, “I would dearly love to (have sat) with her in that beautiful little Victorian home that she had in Oakland, California. … I would try to get at what kept her going in the face of such opposition.

How did she manage to continue to pursue what she loved most? What was the fire in the belly that really kept her going?

Sources and notes

“The woman who replaced Hank Aaron: Telling the story of Toni Stone, first female Negro League player” (by Sandra Svoboda, Metro Times’ 2011 Opening Day Issue), published: April 6, 2011, http://metrotimes.com/culture/the-woman-who-replaced-hank-aaron-1.1128410

“Toni Stone’s life and career — from neighborhood pickup game to cross-country barnstorming to obscurity in retirement — aptly recounted in Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League by Martha Ackmann, a senior lecturer in gender studies at Mount Holyoke College (Massachusetts).

The author spoke with Metro Times (Detroit) about Toni Stone, the Negro Leagues and what they mean to America, http://metrotimes.com/culture/the-woman-who-replaced-hank-aaron-1.1128410

Martha Ackmann

Martha Ackmann is a journalist and senior lecturer in gender studies at Mount Holyoke College. Her specializations: Women athletes, women in aviation and space, women in national politics, U.S. women’s movements, Emily Dickinson. She is “a noted feminist and public intellectual” who has appeared on a variety of U.S. broadcast and print outlets. In addition to Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone, the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League Ackmann is author of The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight, which is a story of American women pilots who were secretly tested to be astronauts in the 1960s. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/facultyprofiles/martha_ackmann

Martha Ackmann appeared on the April 1, 2013, edition of KPFA’s “Letters and Politics,” http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/90273

“Letters & Politics,” hosted by Pacifica’s Mitch Jeserich, focuses on burning political issues and debates and their historical context within the United States and worldwide.

  

Toni Stone

Wikipedia note

Toni Stone (b. July 17, 1921; d. November 2, 1996, also known by her married name Marcenia Lyle Alberga) was the first of three women to play Negro league baseball.

This first female player in the Negro Leagues “was not met with open arms. Most of the men shunned her and gave her a hard time because she was a woman.” She was barred from the locker room and if lucky allowed to change in the umpire’s locker room.

Toni Stone (b. July 17, 1921; d. November 2, 1996) became one of the first women to play as a regular on a big-league professional team in 1953. In 1985 she was inducted into the Women’s Sports Foundation’s International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame. In 1990 she was included in two exhibits at the Baseball Hall of Fame, one on ‘Women in Baseball’ and another on ‘Negro League Baseball’. In 1993 Stone was inducted into the Women’s Sports Hall of Fame as well as the Sudafed International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame. In 1990, Stone’s hometown of Saint Paul, Minnesota declared March 6 ‘Toni Stone Day’. Saint Paul also has a field named after Toni Stone located at the Dunning Baseball Complex. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Stone

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