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Um, it is really. A great pleasure for me to introduce John again. This is the second public meeting that I've had the honor to introduce John Beecher. I think it's an appropriate day for John to be speaking, uh, for those of you who who remember American

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history, today is Thomas Jefferson's birthday. And uh John has deep roots in the South and uh represents the progressive tradition of uh the, the American Revolution to this day. His family has over 300 years of experience in American society. Uh, I think Lyman Beecher wasn't Lyman

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the first. Well he was not exactly the first, but he was the first to be known. To uh Right, I think he was the founder of New Haven, Connecticut. If uh is that? Well, he was a he was a descendant founders laid in a pretty solid

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foundation for the subsequent. They were blacksmiths of the colony for 200 years before they branched out into intellectual pursuits. Well, see, now he, there is no sense in me even giving this uh better than. But I have a few sing myself. Yeah, John is an iron

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worker. In fact, that was one of the things that brought John and myself together. We both have worked in iron shops and uh we had, we swapped many a tale over the last year on our own experiences in iron work. Uh, John's name, the Beecher name,

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of course, uh, many people associate with his relatives Henry Ward Beecher, Lion Beecher. Harriet Beecher. In my opinion, John is one of the great American poets alive today, and this is my not only my opinion, it's the opinion of many people in the field of American

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literature. Now, the reason why John's name is not known is the very reason why we invited him here tonight, and that is the fact that John is a radical and most of the well-known poets who like uh the Sand birds and the Robert Frost, etc. Uh,

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have been poets who, although like Sandberg were progressive, did not go through some of the tough experiences that John went through in his own life. John was blacklisted for 27 years. He lost many a job. Uh, he took a course that took him outside of the

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realm of aca academia. He has always been a people's poet. And in fact one of the striking things about reading John's poetry is the clarity and the strength of the work. He speaks in the popular idiom. It's non-metaphorical writing at its best in my opinion, and

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it's, it's passionate writing. Uh, it's filled with human compassion as you'll hear tonight. John, uh, I feel really embodies what I think is one of the unique qualities of the progressive arts, and that is that he has merged the artistic commitment of his life with political

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commitment in a profound way and to me it only demonstrates again that at the root of both of these enterprises is the notion of human freedom and the defense and the perpetuation and the. The development of human freedom in our culture and I think that this

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to me is one of the striking characteristics of John and so it's my pleasure and, and the pleasure of our organization to give you John Beecher, the poet who speaks for the, the American people. Thank you, Bruce. For that most uh Imaginative introduction. To Uh, I

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hope I'm worthy of. A little of it. I have been In the midst of a rather busy life. In which I have played many roles. One man in his time plays many roles, and I certainly have done so. Um, And I have a very I'll tell

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you a little bit to start with. about my background. On the one hand, my father, was a beacher was a great grandson of the redoubtable Lyman Beechery. Uh, they, uh. Most quoted American of his day, around 1820. After Benjamin Franklin. They said of him. Uh, what

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he said that they quoted, I have been unable to find out. Right Hm. Uh, but apparently he was a, uh, a very eloquent and a rather salty character. Um, And although he was a um Carrier carrier forward of the Jonathan Edwards. Cotton matter traditions. Um, he

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had another side. which only his family was aware of apparently. He loved to play the fiddle. And uh to have get-togethers with the family when he was relaxing from his theology. He was a very famous theologian. In fact, uh he was uh such a great theologian

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that he was tried for heresy. You have to be something of a theologian to be tried for Harrison, you know. In other words, you have to make yourself, uh, you know, go on record as to what you believe, and that is always contrary to what you're

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supposed to believe anyhow. He uh was a theologian and a fiddler. And uh for the delectation of his large family, he had 11 children. Um, Of whom a large number you may find in the dictionary of American biography. Um. They tie the Adamses. In fact, they

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defeat the Adamses if you count out Abigail, who only married into the family of Adams, you know, John Adams' wife. Uh, so Lyman and his brood, you know, did remarkably well in getting their names before the public in various ways. Uh, each one rather different from

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the others. Some of them in a most unusual fashion. Uh, one of them who's only now getting attention was Isabella. His youngest daughter. His oldest daughter, Katherine, various books have been devoted to her recently. She was a pioneer in women's education. And of course my aunt

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Hattie, everybody's known about for a long time. Um, Uncle Tom's cabin and all that. Uh, but my aunt Isabella. was a suffragist. A feminist, a militant. Um, who used to present annual addresses to the Connecticut legislature demanding the vote for women. Long, long years ago, you

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know, over a century, every year she'd be there with her address. And uh she even addressed the Congress of the United States on this subject. And eventually she developed, see, we were a family of theologians. And she developed a theology. Um, Having to do with the

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new millennium. You know, the 1000 years, you know, Christ coming again. That people used to believe that, only this time. The Messiah was coming in female guises. In fact, the Messiah was already here in the person of my aunt Isabella. What? My grandfather was the 3rd

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in the line of Calvinist ministers and my father was destined to be. And he told them You know, more or less where they could shout, uh, as far as he was concerned. Um, he had no ambitions in that direction whatsoever. In fact, he became the modern

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equivalent of a blacksmith and went to work in the steel business after they tried to make a lawyer of him and he finished law school and decided the law wasn't it, so he went to work, uh. And eventually ended up as the chief financial officer of

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the Southern subsidiaries of United States Steel, a Morgan of J, I mean a sort of a Morgan henchman. Uh, JP Morgan controlling United States Steel. It only found that 1901. I was born in 194 in New York City. On the island of Manhattan. Whitman's Manorhatter. And

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uh At the age of 3, the corporation transferred my father. To Birmingham, Alabama, where I was raised with this abolitionist background of mine and with my Yankee heritage on my father's side, on my mother's side, my mother was a An Irish woman Whose parents were immigrants.

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Her father was a coal miner and had been a Molly McGuire. Back in the 19th century in the 1840s in Ireland, the Molly McGuire's were the 19th century equivalent. Of um of the early mid-nineteenth century equivalent of the IRA man of today. He was an Irish

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revolutionary and got out just one jump ahead of the of the hangman. Uh, to come to this country. He had a large influence on me when I was very small. I used to visit. Uh, him and my mother's family in Ohio, uh, near Youngstown, the Great

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Steel Center, uh, every summer. And he would, I would sit by him on the porch or we would go fishing or elderberrying and he would uh. Fill me in on this whole frightful story of the treatment of the Irish by the British. So on both sides,

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I came into this kind of radical heritage. My father was no radical. I'm telling you, he was a henchman for JP Morgan. Um, however, he was a rebel against his family tradition. And he told me the beechers were a bunch of nuts. I remember him telling

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you. He had no desire to emulate his uh very famous uh ancestors, aunts, uncles, great grandfathers, grandfathers and so on. So that at least kind of filled you in on my background. So Uh, you notice I don't have a southern accent because I decided young that

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I wasn't going to have one. That I was a Yankee. They called me a Yankee and they made me. Do um penance for aromatics. In my own person. I would be the Yankee army and they would attack me. In force Changing the usual what we were

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told was the usual proportion of forces, you know, they used to say that uh one confederate could lick half a dozen Yankees, but one Yankee had to lick half confederates or maybe more sometime in my life. Um, this, I think kind of fixed me in the

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role. This is why. Um, Like so many Um, Old radicals. I am still a radical. Unlike so many old radicals, I am still radical. I am surprised, Bruce, to hear you tell me that you can still find it around because most of us learn. That uh

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Radicalism didn't pay off in this country. And this was something that had gone out in about 1789. You know, and uh that we were supposed to know better, that they, they would tolerate a certain amount of this and you. But, uh, of, uh. Um, several years,

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you were supposed to read the handwriting on the wall and uh. Uh, become a good American like everybody else and uh do a John Doos pact. I knew him well. Before My wife is giving me a dirty look. The meaning of this dirty look is stop

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the yakking. And get on with the poetry. So that's what the people came to hear. Um, rather than your accustomed nightclub act. Being a stand-up comic. All right. I want to read you First, A uh The poem I wrote in 1963. That for me was a

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late point. Uh, It was during the time And Martin Luther King. was carrying on or leading his demonstrations in my old hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. And I was out here in California at that time. I was taught in residence at the University of Santa Clara. After

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I had been fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath required of public employees in California, I ultimately came back to teach. For the Jesuits in uh Santa Clara, which is one of the more, one of the odd things that keep happening in my life, you

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know, nobody quite believes what they're true. Anyhow, I couldn't get back south, um. Because of my commitments, but I, uh, thought a great deal about Um, What I had learned as a child. How I had seen. The whole racial question. And um I wrote a number

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of poems. In the summer of '63, following the King demonstrations. Bull Connor, the fire hoses, the dogs, and all the rest of it. The stockades where they put the kids in, you know, uh, locked them up, school kids. Um, But I was obsessed. With the memory

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of a woman. Who was known To all of us In Birmingham, which then was a much smaller city, but still pretty good sized city for the south, um. This woman We didn't know her name. She was black. And we call her Chaney. Or we sometimes called

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her walking Chaney. Because She was always walking. Talking to herself, looking in the garbage cans. And finding what sustenance she could from the garbage cans because back in those days they had no foolishness like welfare or relief or anything like that. And this is how she

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managed to stay alive. And I wrote this poem. Which um It took me I think I spent It's a short poem. Of About 12 lines and it took me about 3 weeks. I wasn't doing anything else. It happened to hit during my summer vacation. And I

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kept writing, rewriting it. I think I did 55 versions, something like that. Sometimes things come right out, but this one. Uh, just one. So when I finally got it. Um, I thought, well, I think this is it. And I haven't changed my mind since. I wouldn't

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want to change a word of it. Uh, sometimes things come very hard, sometimes they come very easy. I don't know why. Cha The field boss claimed his privilege. Her knife Quenched all his lust for black girls. She got life in the big rock. And swung a

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chain gang pick a quarter century before she broke. To save her keep. They kicked her out, paroled. Rootho or die. Thereafter, she despoiled our garbage cans of what our pampered pets, of what our pampered pets repudiated. We capering white rats. Dogged her around. Mocking that tethered

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gate. She shambled. Rolling eye On every street in Birmingham. Mumbling Of judgment. All our minds were shackled. By her change And Right I want to read another poem. I want to keep this pretty chronological, although the poems are not necessarily in chronological order being written.

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But this happens to be one of my very early poems written in my perhaps when I was 19 or 20 or so. And uh When My father was sent to Birmingham in 1907. His company alone. hired From the state At a cost of 4 bits a

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day, 50 cents each, hired 500 black convicts to mine the coal. And there Coal mines It was a company which had coal mines. Limestone and dolomite quarries. Glast furnaces, steel mills, and industrial railroad, so it was the biggest industrial company in the South, as a matter

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of fact, for many years. Um, But 300 of the coal miners were black captives. And uh A lot of the private Coal mining companies didn't employ any other coal miners. But these convicts that they would rent from the state. Uh, the state saw to it that

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there were enough convicts. If necessary, uh, the sheriff would get their stooges to organize crap games. Uh, so that they could be raided. And people could be taken off, you know, and given fines that they couldn't pay and they would have to work them out on

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the game. And my friend Uh, Professor C. Van Woodward of Yale. Whom some of you may know of, the Sterling Professor of history at Yale, has written a lot of uh very important historical books. Uh, in one of his books, he estimated that the average life.

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Of a convict, a black convict in an Alabama coal mine in those days was 6 months. They used to build the Barracks Bard Barracks. Jail barracks right at the pitheads. And the people, when they came in at night. Would have their little supper and fall into

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bed fully clothed. On their strong mattress. I learned this from our gardener when I was 4 years old, riding back and forth in his wheelbarrow when he was bringing loam from the woods. This, I don't know where he learned it. He was a young guy at

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17, maybe he'd been to the mines, but anyhow, he told me all about. And this poem was right out of my recollection of what he had told me. About what life was like in the mines. And uh How these uh people were roused by a trustee.

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The trustee was a real criminal who was kept there to keep order amongst these crap shooters and other minor criminals who made up the majority of the workers. It's called convict mind revelry. It's kind of a song. To Cha Wake up, man, and get your 4

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o'clock coffee. Knights and gone to dig your task. Days done come to dig your task. Nights done gone, but they won't last. Wake up man and pick that coal. Let's hear them hobnails hit that floor. Wake up Wake up Wake up, man, and get your 4

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o'clock coffee. Never quite right on the head. You know, not to, uh. Um, Conformist Well, My father found me a job on the open hearth furnaces in the steel mills, the hardest work in the open hearth or in the steel mills for that matter. Back in

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those times, we used to work what they called twelve-hour day. They didn't have any unions. In fact, when the Steel strike of 1919. Uh, took place, um. Under the leadership of William C. Foster. Um, And was uh broken as you all know from your labor history

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was broken by the coal and iron police. Riding up on the houses of people's on the porches of people's houses and clubbing them down on their doorways and everything else. Um, Judge Albert H. Gary. That saintly figure who was chairman of the United States Steel Corporation

00:28:23.910 - 00:28:45.280

under the JP Morgan. uh, he just Gary said The men don't want to eat our day. I conducted, I was working out in the open heart then. I conducted a kind of an informal Gallup poll. This is before the days of the Gallup poll amongst the

00:28:45.280 - 00:29:09.069

men. And I said, how many of you guys don't want the eight hour day, and I never found anybody. Who didn't want it and what they had. To say about Judge Gary. Doesn't bear repeating. In the hall of a Methodist church certainly. I don't know where

00:29:09.069 - 00:29:31.760

he got his information. Well that's what he said. Well, actually, we didn't work a 12 hour day. We worked an 11 hour day. 6 days a week from Monday through Saturday. And then we had 24 hours off and we came back Sunday night at 5:30 and

00:29:31.760 - 00:29:54.430

we worked till Monday morning at 6:30 and we worked 13 hours and we worked 7. Nights in a row. We worked 66 hours one week and 91, the next, but at that, we were luckier than the northern mills in Pittsburgh and Chicago and Cleveland where every

00:29:54.430 - 00:30:20.119

two weeks they worked 24 hour shift when they swung from night to day. But we for some reason never had perhaps our uh Superiors were more humane. I know. There were no unions There were no welfare, there were no pensions, and when anybody got hurt or

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killed, if they could under the compensation laws then enforce if they could. Um, Make out that it had been the fault of the man who had been hurt or killed or of one of his fellow workers, the company was not responsible. And they had a character

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called the safety clerk. Uh, whose job it was to go around following up on all accidents and blame the accidents on the man who had gotten killed or hurt. That was his job, the safety clerk. It hasn't changed I'm surprised. I thought all that had been

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cleaned up. No.