by Wayne Pounds
Professor Emeritus
Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo
After his death in 1952, Covington Hall--labor activist, editor, historian, poet--suffered decades of critical oblivion, as did other radical writers from the 1880s to the 1930s. In Hall’s case, since the 1990s this situation has been remedied first by the labor historian David R. Roediger, who in 1994 published a long treatment of Hall’s racial egalitarianism in his collection The Abolition of Whiteness and five years later succeeded in getting Hall’s Labor Struggles in the Deep South into print, including a sampler of selected articles and half a dozen poems. In 2003 Jeffory Clymer’s America’s Culture of Terrorism appeared, which includes a ten-page discussion of Hall. The student of Hall owes a large debt to the work of both of these scholars. Labor Struggles, completed in the mid-1940s, was a long buried classic, cited by historians but never read by the public; and Clymer’s contribution moves Hall from the arena of labor history into the more highly charged discourse of terrorism--or to be fair and more accurate, the discourse which excavates the notion of sabotage as that term loomed in the American cultural imagination of the period 1900-1920, an imagination whose primary focus was terrorism.
Though in what follows my principal object is to introduce and contextualize the poetry of Covington Hall, I must initially state my dissatisfaction with Clymer’s treatment of the only poet considered in his book. Much as I appreciate the value of the New Historicist emphasis on reading culture as an antidote to the formalist readings of our critical past, it seems to me that a necessary preliminary step in the reading of the poet Hall has been omitted, and that is to establish not just the context of the labor struggles of the period but the full context of the poetry that Hall was writing. We need both kinds of reading, the formal as well as the cultural-historical. Before the latter reading, however, it is necessary first to read the poems as poems, which means to read each poem in the context of other works by the poet. This, after all, is the way we read poetry. We learn to read Blake or Shelley by reading more Blake or Shelley.
This procedure is unfair to Clymer, from whose work I have profited, for it is to lay the whole baggage of New Historicist sins at his door. My justification is that he has written about Covington Hall, who is my subject. To treat poems as unprivileged text is the critic’s prerogative, but the prerogative can be exercised only at the risk of distorting that which wants elucidation.
To read Hall first as a poet instead of a historian of labor struggles or a purveyor of the volatile discourse of sabotage, we need not only to read the poems together but we need or would like to have a statement from the author about his intentions (his poetics) and his influences. We gain a greater appreciation of Hall’s work by reading it first in the context of poetry, then of the popular poetry of the labor struggles, then of Hall’s other poems. Though this may seem the stodgiest sort of traditionalism, the cultural reading needs to be preceded by considerations of biography, genre, poetics, and influences, for these too are essential matters of history and culture. Only when this is done, will we know what we’re doing when we add his name to the ongoing project of cultural recovery and preservation in which popular poetry of the past--including poetry by minorities, poetry by women, the poetry of popular song, and the poetry of mass social movements--is revalued.
Popular Poetry
During the 1890s, Populist presses published hundreds of poems as part of an effort to create an alternative to the culture of industrial empire. The full-fledged birth of the American Empire came with the Spanish-American War of 1898 and our first acquisition of overseas possessions. Poets like Edwin Markham and William Vaughn Moody wrote poetry that was socially engaged and critical. In the next decade the names of a group I call the prairie Poets are familiar: Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg. As Carey Nelson notes, all three grew up on the edges of radical currents that entered their poetry (ND 931-32, NRR 235). And this “long tradition of political poetry continued to flourish in important subcultures and in moments of national crisis before it came to full fruition in the Harlem Renaissance and in the widely politicized 1930s” (NRR 21). I would agree with Nelson that “By far the largest gaps in our knowledge . . . are from the half-century that leads up to the 1930s” (NRM 2), where the primary texts are hard to find.
Primary sources from the fifty years leading up to 1930 are the periodical publications and the anthologies of the day. The former mix the poetry of the labor movement with that of feminism, of agricultural revolt, and of black pride. They are legion and often ephemeral, but even the anthologies are too numerous to name here. Let it suffice to mention one of the most important, the ambitious Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry, edited by Marcus Graham in 1929, the year the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. It starts with 95 Forerunners (including Blake, Shelley, and Whitman), proceeds through two hundred modern poets, mostly American, and ends with fifty pages of translations from fifteen languages including Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Ukrainian. Among the modern poets are Frost with “Fire and Ice,” Pound with “Commission,” and Eliot with “The Hollow Men.” The last may surprise us but the first two should not. Both Pound and Frost carried on a dialogue with the left all during the 1920s. Graham’s anthology included a Langston Hughes’ poem called “Silhouettes.” Graham gave Hughes an inscribed copy, which is now part of the Langston Hughes archives. Many of the poets associated with the Harlem Renaissance are included in this anthology.
Biographical
Covington Hall was an essayist, a historian, a prolific poet, and writer for many of the socialist periodicals associated with the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World). His career in radical causes spanned four decades. He knew something about living in a conquered province, and it was this knowledge and the experience of being declassed that pushed him into labor radicalism. Hall never completely lost his regional loyalty, a point that needs to be kept in mind.
Born in 1871, just six years after the Confederate defeat in the Civil War, Hall descended from the Southern elite on both sides. His father was Rev. William A. Hall, a Presbyterian minister and educator. His mother was Mary Elizabeth Pierce, youngest daughter of a planter family of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. His parents having split up, Hall spent his youth in Bayou Terrebone, Terrebonne Parish, on a sugar plantation owned by his half-uncle, Dr. A. V. Woods, whom Hall calls his Uncle Ami. The teenaged Hall witnessed the death of his uncle and loss of the family’s standing among the white elite because of its settlement with Knights of Labor members in the 1887 strike. He saw scenes from the massacres which ended that strike and, by 1891, witnessed his family bankrupted and its sugar plantation sold in a sheriff’s auction.
Hall arrived in New Orleans in time for the general strike of 1892 and the panic of 1893, tramping the streets in search of jobs during the depression which followed. He would later write of this episode:
It was a very personal matter to the writer and his family. When the strike was called my Uncle Ami had died, and our Uncle Rodney Woods was in charge of the home place. He gave in to the demands, not because he wished to, but because he had no other option. He would have lost the crop and everything else, including the place, if he had not done so. (LSDS 50-51)
Although in politics Hall began as a Populist supporter of William Jennings Bryan, the loss of the family estate provided him a first-hand view of radical labor struggles. The struggle became his career, and the indispensable history of it he would write late in life is based on his own participation. It begins with the strike in New Orleans in 1892 of the black and white dock workers, it subsequently takes up the earlier Knights of Labor strike in the Sugar Bowl (the sugar-cane raising area of southeast Louisiana) in 1887, a notoriously bloody strike that ended in the Thibodaux Massacre and the loss of the Hall family plantation, and then moves to the Louisiana-Texas lumber wars of 1910-1913. It concludes with the organization of agricultural labor in the two years preceding U.S. entry into WWI.
The year 1891 was a formative one in the writer’s life, and marked the point where he began to abandon his identification with the planter elite. Though he left Terrebonne Parish for New Orleans, the identification didn’t cease at once. As late as 1904, he still served as Adjutant of Camp Beauregard, United Sons of Confederated Veterans. Oscar Ameringer, the German-born editor of radical labor newspapers, often called “The Mark Twain of American Socialism,” remembered him from these years as “the poet of forgotten men” and “the handsomest young man in all New Orleans.”
On top of that, he was its best-dressed man, who set the fashion for the male population. On top of that, he was adjutant general of the Sons of the Confederacy. And on top of all that, he was a member of the Covington and Hall families, two of the oldest and most honored families of the old South. 209
Though his labor activism began there in 1892, when he was twenty-one, it took another ten years for him to drop out of the Sons of Confederated Veterans. Clearly, the two were not wholly contradictory, for the Confederates were always known as rebels, and his new identity gave a renewed life to that term, providing part of the title of a series of poems, books, and periodicals.
Hall may have dressed well at first, but his clothes were wearing out. After arriving in New Orleans in 1891, he allied himself with Wobblies as the last best hope of the working classes, and he worked as an organizer and a newspaper editor first in the dock-worker strikes in New Orleans, then with the Brotherhood of Timber Workers against the lumber barons in Louisiana, through the famous Grabow and Merryville strikes. By1907 he had helped organize those he called “the white and black dockslaves of New Orleans” as well as workers in the Louisiana-Texas Piney Woods region. His allegiance was to the Wobblies. Moderate labor organizations and social workers stayed away from him because his stance on racial unity was too strong.
After 1907, Hall combined writing, editing, and organizing in radical activities, a labor which stretched until his death in 1951. Sometime in the early 1940s Hall began his most important work, Labor Struggles in the Deep South. Completed by 1949, it was not published until fifty years later, though during that half century it had become an underground classic among historians, the single most-cited non-fiction source on labor conditions in the South.
Through most of that career, he was a leading member of the IWW, although he often differed with their policies by opposing even minimal centralization of authority and by advocating organization of small farmers and tenant farmers, who the IWW did not consider “industrial workers.” During the Timber Wars in Louisiana and Texas before WWI, he edited The Lumberjack as the organ of the National Industrial Union of Forest and Lumber Workers.
His subsequent literary-political journal, Rebellion, bore the subtitle: Made up of Dreams and Dynamite, A striking phrase that would provide the title for his collected poems of 1946. The plea for “a Dollar or Two” illustrates the poverty of the publishing conditions, as does the fact that distribution is at least in part by direct mail. The 15 May 1913 issue of Hall’s periodical The Lumberjack featured a poem called “Rebellion.” Hall placed it first in his 1915 collection Songs of Rebellion, indicating that he may have thought of it at that time as his signature poem. This early version has seven stanzas. Its named heroes are Lucifer in first place, followed by Gautama, Moses, Mahomet, Zoroaster, Confucius, Cromwell, Voltaire, Marat, and St. Just, with the seventh turning to more recent figures, Abe Lincoln, Marx, and Ferrer. The later version of the poem, which appears in the 1946 collection, is lengthened to eleven stanzas by increasing the number heroes to include the Rebel Angels, Adami, Christ, Jefferson, Bruno, Emmet, Byron, Lenin, Lehman, Gene Debs, St. John, and Joe Hill.
Rebellion, 1916
The poem is longer without being stronger. The best line in the poem is still the fifth line of the first version:
Rebellion comes, hope’s sacred fire,
To Freedom’s son from Freedom’s sire;
A soul-breath swordsmen cannot kill,
Nor gold, nor cross, nor rifle still.
With Lucifer it marched on God
And broke Jehovah’s scourging rod . . .
The syntax of the fifth line is brilliant in the way it suggests that God is an earthly city or empire like Babylon or Rome, something the army of rebellion can march on. This syntactic punch is lost in the 1946 version, which substitutes
With Lucifer, who challenged all,
Its Rebel Angels chose to fall . . .
Indeed, the notion that the Rebel Angels “chose” to fall is a defeatist or “weak” reading of this archetypal revolt.
During the twenties, Hall worked a a publicist for the Non-Partisan League, a radical agrarian movement based mainly in the Dakotas and other Northern farm states but also having a Southern following. Later he would organize oil workers in the South, fight the lumber bosses in the Pacific Northwest, and help organize the left-populist Nonpartisan League in the Dakotas. Along with the Kansan Kate Richards O’Hare, he participated in the crusade to free comrades imprisoned for their opposition to WWI.
Most of these utopian projects, of course, floundered, and Hall lived continually in dire financial straits. Despite his age, he remained active during the Depression years, writing many of the IWW’s most forceful attacks on New Deal liberalism. During the second world war, he would look back and say,
I was born in the midst of tumults and riots and, if I live a few years or months longer, I expect to die in the midst of tumults and riot. . . . I have seen the collapse and downfall of two great social systems, Southern Feudalism and now, of Capitalism; and I see no hope for a free and democratic Republic and World other than in a Cooperative Democracy. A Confederation of the World based on the Jeffersonian principle of “Equal rights and opportunities to all and special privileges to none.” (quoted in Finley, unpaginated)
The key to understanding Hall’s life in radical politics is found in the title of his major contribution to labor history, his 1940 Labor Struggles in the Deep South. Though first we may read this as a noun phrase, it is also a simple declarative sentence with “struggles” as the verb: Labor struggles. Perhaps, late in life, Hall tired of the struggle, for he chose to be interred in Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans Parish. Some of his family were there, such as his beloved uncle Dr. Andrew Van Woods, but the cemetery is famous for notable Confederates like Jefferson Davis (original burial site, now removed), General Beauregard, and General Johnston (body removed), whose statue crowns the Tomb of the Army of Tennessee. As a return to his ancestral sources, his choice of Metairie Cemetery adds a final irenic note to a life of strenuous rebellion.
As to the key to Hall’s life as a poet, I am not sure where it is to be found, though I would suggest two unrelated words as clues. The first is “scattered.” It is a term that every editor of Hall’s poetry uses. It suggests that, as the labor battles of his life were fought in many areas, that he scattered poems in the short-lived radical newspapers of whatever region he was working. The editors agree in numbering these poems vaguely in the “hundreds.” Cary Nelson states that “only a very tiny percentage of Covington Hall’s poems . . . are collected in his books (NRR 266).
During Hall’s lifetime, four collections appeared. The first, Songs of Rebellion, was printed by John J. Weihing Printing Co. in New Orleans in 1915. Few publications by this printer are known but in 1917 Weihing published a campaign biography for Martin Behrman, the longest-serving mayor in the history of New Orleans, and a politician of whom both Hall in Labor Struggles and Oscar Ameringer in his autobiography speak well.
The second, Rhymes of a Rebel, was printed in 1931 by the Llano Co-operative Colony Printery in New Llano (or Newllano), western Louisiana. Originally named Stables, the town was renamed when 200 members of the Socialist commune Llano Del Rio Cooperative Colony in California relocated to this site in 1917, giving the town its present name. It continued to function as a socialist commune until 1939. I have seen only scans of pages from this book, and I know of no published article by a scholar who has held the whole book in her hands. The website worldcat.org notes that it has 53 unnumbered pages with illustrations (lino cuts) by Ivy R. Young. If the scans I have seen are representative, these are sentimental poems harkening back to the third section of Songs of Rebellion.
The third, Battle Hymns of Toil (1946), is a collected poems and boasts some editorial apparatus, including a two-page biography by Ira M. Finley, Editor of the General Welfare Reporter of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, which operated from 1942 until at least 1947. Finley is remembered for establishing the Veterans of Industry of America (VIA), a Depression-era, radical labor group chartered in September of 1932, in Oklahoma City. Although the organization's name suggests nationwide membership, it never expanded outside Oklahoma. As a large percentage of the members were African Americans, the group provided the first example in Oklahoma history of an interracial cooperative effort. Finley’s colleague in Oklahoma City was Freda Ameringer, widow of Oscar Ameringer and editor of The Oklahoma Leader, where she succeeded her husband after his death. In his introductory biography, Finley states that Freda Ameringer “is publishing the first one thousand copies of these poems without charge,” indicating the nature of the book’s publication and promotion.
Front cover, 1946
Thus, in discussing Hall under the rubric of “popular poetry,” my intention has not been to suggest he was widely read. He was not. But his intended audience was the populus.
Poetics and Influences
Before looking at poetics and influences, it would be well to establish the nature of Hall’s audience and their expectations. This project is facilitated by John Graham’s 1990 anthology drawn from the Appeal to Reason. He states that “Published from 1895 to 1922, the Appeal preceded the formation of the Socialist party in 1901 and, more than any other socialist institution, gave ongoing life, power, and a sense of community to insurgent radicals” (1). Published after 1897 in Girard Kansas, in 1913 the Appeal was reaching a paid-circulation of over 760,000. A newspaper was precious among the laboring poor, and it seems safe to imaging an actual readership of several times that figure. During this period, Graham states, “the Appeal was more closely identified with the socialist movement than any other paper” (1).
The relevant section of the Appeal anthology is the editor’s introduction to the section on Poetry and Fiction. There we read:
Poetry and fiction retained more of their democratic, social origins than at present, and many, many thousands of Americans--a higher proportion of the population than now writes letters to the editor--wrote and submitted poetry to their newspapers about everyday, personal, and national concerns. Nor did “literature,” now predominantly coded to mean more or less hermetic writing for the appreciation of an elite audience, carry the social prestige arising from class-based practice. Instead, turn of the century American literature, in its wide range of forms, was still in the process of being transformed from a democratically practiced craft to a socially privileged “art.” (215)
Thus, we do not find the formal play characteristic of canonical Modernism. Rather, “standard forms and conventions bound readers in community and [did] not detract from the provocative subversion of the same conventions present elsewhere in the Appeal’s literary selections” (216). The word “literary” in this last phrase must refer to the presence of writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who submitted a poem, and prose by Stephen Crane and Jack London. Gilman’s poem as we would expect is “dense and powered by conceptual theory” but adheres to traditional verse form.
Gilman’s verse is singled out for attention because for the editor it captures the “ominous threat of class war,” with its “menacing, even cataclysmic, implication . . . more effectively than any other in the Appeal. Graham finds the open ending “provocative” in its “deliberate refusal to dissipate either meaning of the urgency of American conditions” (217). Given that the questions of “threat” and “provocation” will emerge again in Clymer’s view of Hall’s work, Gilman’s poem merits brief quotation. Here are the first of its seven stanza-and-refrains and the last. The poem is called “The Lost Game.”
Came the big children to the little ones,
And unto them full pleasantly did say,
“Lo! we have spread for you a merry game,
And ye shall all be winners at the same.
Come now and play!”
Great is the game they enter in--
Rouge et Noir on a giant scale--
Red with blood and black with sin,
Where may must lose and few may win,
And the players never fail!
. . .
But those rich players grew so very few,
So many grew the poor ones, that one day
They rose from that table, side by side,
Calm, countless, terrible--they rose and cried
In one great voice that shook the heavens wide
“we will not play!”
Where is the game of Rouge et Noir?
Where is the wealth of yesterday?
What availeth the power ye tell
And the skill in the game ye play so well
If the players will not play? (222-23)
The poor children’s final “We will not play” may be provocative, it may even amount to a call for a kind of sabotage, but it does not threaten dynamite. Indeed, the word “calm” used to describe the “one great voice” denies the threat of violence. We will find the same irenic note in the most exhortational poems of Hall.
If Gilman’s poem exemplifies the poetics of the Appeal to Reason, Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney’s Introduction to Marcus Graham’s 1929 An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry gives a full-blown, explicit statement of revolutionary poetics. Though Hall had no hand in writing it, as a member of the Publications Committee he must have subscribed to it.
Poetry and propaganda are two sides of the same shield. Without passion there can be no poetry, and all who feel strongly burn with a zeal to have others share their feeling. True poets are also propagandists . . . .
What are the modern seven wonders of the world? the increasing recognition that equal, unrestricted opportunity belongs to all individuals of all races and creeds...the rising opposition to violence and murder, whether they be expressed in lynching, capital punishment, or war… .
If there be any among the radical movement who ignore the poet as a practical factor in the fight for freedom, let such recall the lives of Milton, Byron and Shelley… .
Many poets forget that the Tower of Ivory is built of ivory-white bones and is shadowed by the Tower of Babel! But the wiser and greater poets know that none is safe when pestilence tramples the earth, be it the fever of disease that ravages the body or the fever of Capitalism which ravages bodies and all else human and humane. They know that we are "members one of another" and that it takes the joy of all to make the joy of one.
You will find their poems in this book. Some attack war, prostitution, child labor, the deadening effects of too long a workday, unemployment and other evil effects of Capitalism and exploitation. Others attack the present evil system in its entirety. Some voice the protest of the Child. Others sing the Women's Revolt. Most acclaim the Labor Movement, which includes the revolt of women and children. Still others prophesy of the Golden Age they see ahead when the reign of gold shall be ended. . . . . (35-41)
Trent and Cheyney conclude by noting that “This anthology is a prophecy of the destruction of the old “culture” and “civilization” based on slavery and of the birth of the new humanism which surely will blossom from freedom. . . . . As such, look herein for strength rather than smoothness, meaning rather than melody.” This statement, nearly formulaic though it is, doesn’t apply to Hall, who as an accomplished poet has the arrows of both smoothness and melody in his quiver, depending on the effect aimed at.
Generally, however, the poetics above fits Hall’s work. There is no demand that traditional forms be used, but the assumption that they will be is there. The language of the poem need not be “the common language of men” but the events related need to be drawn from their common experience. The poem should describe the problems of the working class and show an interest in their solution. It may envision a better world, but even if this vision is lacking it should give the reader hope.
In passing it may be noted that this anthology probably signals the high point of the reputation of Covington Hall, whose appointment to the Publications Committee was a mark of recognition, as other appointees were a roll call of important leftist poets, including Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg, Lola Ridge, Louis Ginsberg (father of Allen Ginsberg), and Lucia Trent.
An unpublished letter by the in-house historian of the IWW, Fred Thompson, ”notes Blake’s influence on Hall and terms Shelley Hall’s ‘favorite poet’ adding “and next to him Burns” (Roediger, “Poetry and Politics,“ 168n.14 ). Among the “Forerunners,” the anthology contains poems all of these three poets.
Blake’s influence stems not as one might expect from poems like “Holy Thursday” in Songs of Experience, but from the elevation of the figure of Satan in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the prophetic books. But the glorification of the rebel is so constant in Hall’s work, that if we feel Blake’s presence it is diffuse rather than specific. Hall’s verse forms reflect no debt to Blake.
Although Burns’ poems of sharp social critique like ”Is There for Honest Poverty” (“A Man’s A Man for A’ That”) and the exhortational “Scots, Wha Hae wi’ Wallace bled,” the poetry of “the heaven-taught plowman” may well lay behind Hall’s more sentimental efforts, omitted here.
The name of Shelley will have been noted in the Trent-Cheyney introduction, and the poet himself appears in the anthology with three selections: “The Royal Masque,” from the unfinished play Charles the First; “To the Men of England”; and “The Trinity” from Prometheus Unbound (116-120). Any reader of Shelley would have known the famous defiances of tyranny in Prometheus, but Hall would have known the fragments from Charles the First through George Woodberry’s 1892 edition of Shelley. Though in his poems of social critique Hall avoids the pentameter line in favor of more popular verse forms--tetrameter, double tetrameter, and fourteeners--his poetry of declarative observation certainly recalls lines like these from Charles the First:
Ay, there they are—
Nobles, and sons of nobles, patentees,
Monopolists, and stewards of this poor farm,
On whose lean sheep sit the prophetic crows,
Here is the pomp that strips the houseless orphan,
Here is the pride that breaks the desolate heart.
These are the lilies glorious as Solomon,
Who toil not, neither do they spin,—unless
It be the webs they catch poor rogues withal.
Here is the surfeit which to them who earn
The niggard wages of the earth, scarce leaves
The tithe that will support them till they crawl
Back to her cold hard bosom. Here is health
Followed by grim disease, glory by shame,
Waste by lame famine, wealth by squalid want,
And England's sin by England's punishment.
And, as the effect pursues the cause foregone,
Lo, giving substance to my words, behold
At once the sign and the thing signified—
A troop of cripples, beggars, and lean outcasts,
Horsed upon stumbling jades, carted with dung,
Dragged for a day from cellars and low cabins
And rotten hiding-holes, to point the moral
Of this presentment, and bring up the rear
Of painted pomp with misery!
These lines may be profitably compared to the opening stanzas of “Why I Am a Revolutionist.” The chief difference observed will be that Hall prefers not the third person of dramatic utterance but the first, the poetry of first-person witness, as in the repeated “I have seen” that opens each stanza.
Hall’s proximity to Shelley may be clearest in that they both wrote poems dedicated to the Irish nationalist Robert Emmet. Hall’s poem first appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune for August 1901, where it was called simply “Emmet,” whereas Shelley’s two-quatrain fragment is called “On Robert Emmet’s Grave.” However, there is no echo of Shelley’s fragment in Hall’s poem, neither in phrase nor in form. Indeed, it would seem likely that Hall did not know the poem and only became acquainted with Robert Emmet through the many Irish-Americans involved in the New Orleans labor struggles. Yet, if if here a new-historicist style excursion may be allowed, other subtle threads link Hall and Emmet.
It is little noted that an Irish-American named Henry James payed homage to Robert Emmet in A Small Boy and Others--the homage in fact of almost claiming kinship. This fact was noticed by Frederick W. Dupee in the notes to his 1956 edition of the Autobiography, as Dupee calls it. (His title is a publisher’s convenience for combining A Small Boy and Others with Notes of a Son and Brother.) James speaks of a dance that “took place in the house of our cousins Robert and Kitty Emmet the elder,” explaining, “for we were to have two cousin Kittys of that ilk and yet another consanguineous Robert at least; the latter name being naturally, among them all, of a pious, indeed of a glorious, tradition . . . (25).” This is Jamesianly obscure enough, so that the reader is grateful for Dupee’s comment:
The Emmets were related to the Jameses by the marriage of Catharine Margaret James to Colonel Robert Emmet Temple. Robert Emmet’s name had “pious” associations with the Irish patriot of that name (1778-1803). (603)
The note of consanguinity remains locked in obscurity (what was Col. Temple’s relationship to the Irish patriot?). For links connecting James and Hall, we have to wait until 2003 when both appear inside the covers of Clymer’s America’s Culture of Terrorism, where the author devotes thirty pages to James’s The Princess Casamassima and ten to Covington Hall’s work. While Clymer finds no “serious mention” of dynamite in James’s long novel, in spite of the three coordinated blasts that terrified London in 1885, the year the novel was serialized, his ten pages on Hall find plenty of ammunition under the rubric of sabotage.
Sabotage
Clymer discusses Hall’s work in a chapter called “Sabotage,“ and his prime exhibit of the “vicious” language embodying the threat of violence is “Us the Hoboes and the Dreamers.” Though I appreciate and commend Clymer’s excellent book, I am not comfortable with his dark view of Hall’s important poem, nor does the equivocating word sabotage afford me much comfort.
In his introduction Clymer states that “The chapter focuses on the 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing, the IWW’s engagement with the politics of sabotage, and the poetry of Covington Hall.” A few lines below he notes that “notions of sabotage encompassed many ideological contradictions that made the concept crackle with cultural energy” (31). The equivocation that makes the concept crackle has to do with the difficulty of knowing who is doing what to whom. Is it the workers who sabotage the capitalists, or is it the converse? As Clymer recognizes, it is both.
Of course it is the former sense that was and still is primary in public discourse, and yet as early as the turn of the century the converse was well recognized, as Clymer states. IWW pamphlet writers frequently pointed out that “one of the most egregious forms” was “the sabotage that capitalists themselves regularly practice: Infiltrating workers organizations with spies and agents provocateurs and, more harmful to the public, illegally adulterating foodstuffs and other products” (200). These were among the primary forms of capitalist sabotage decried by the IWW. On the question of provocateurs, it is surely notable that the bombing of the Los Angeles Times was thought to have been carried out by an agent of the Burns Detective Agency. In a way almost predictable for a person in this role, the provocateur turned state’s evidence and became the prosecution’s start witness against the IWW’s McNamara brothers, whom the forces of law and order wanted to make the primary instigators (181). This indecidability is part of the cultural energy that crackled about this and similar cases.
Whatever dark view of the IWW was being promulgated in the mass media controlled by the captains of industry, the IWW itself projected a clear image of nonviolent “direct action.” Clymer establishes this by quoting from three contemporary IWW pamphlets: William E. Trautmann's Direct Action and Sabotage, 1912; Walker C. Smith’s Sabotage: Its History, Philosophy & Function, 1913; and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers' Industrial Efficiency, 1916. For these writers, sabotage consisted of “soldiering on the job, working slowly, misdirecting shipments or bills of lading, exposing company secrets or owners’ bad faith practices toward consumers, and even working strictly according to rules, thereby shunning initiative or ingenuity.” Bill Haywood’s idea of violence was”the havoc we raise with money by laying down our tools” (187). “We strike with our hands in our pockets,” he said, evoking the “folded arms” strategy and its famous icon.
Perhaps one of the clearest statements of what “direct action” meant to the IWW is provided by Kornbluh in her chapter called “With Folded Arms: The Tactics of Direct Action.” She cites “an IWW publication”: “Direct action means industrial action directly by, for, and of the workers themselves, without the treacherous aid of labor misleaders, or scheming politicians” (35). That is, the emphasis of the phrase is not the word action, whatever that may be taken to imply, but direct--stemming from the workers themselves without intermediary.
The cover to the 22nd edition of the IWW Songbook (1926). Note the folded arms.
On the IWW, it is fitting that Clymer be allowed the last word, and it’s a fair word. He cites the National Civil Liberties Bureau’s 1919 finding “that not a single charge of violence has been proved against the union” and and 1939 Johns Hopkins study finding that “no IWW saboteur has been caught and convicted.” The ultimate source here is the 1956 history of the IWW by Fred Thompson, the activist and historian mentioned above and cited by Clymer a few notes earlier. Here is what Thompson says:
[The IWW’s] weird reputation [for sabotage] has no relevance to the facts, but it became so widespread and had such an influence on its subsequent history, that the history of the myth must be told alongside the history of the actual organization. Perhaps the simplest answer to the myth is the finding of an extensive study issued by Johns Hopkins University in 1939: “Although there are contradictory opinions as to whether the IWW practices sabotage or not, it is interesting to note that no case of an IWW saboteur caught practicing sabotage or convicted of its practice is available.” (81)
Five pages later, , as Clymer notes, Thompson suggests that the Wobblies’s reputation for sabotage resulted from soapbox orators who talked about sabotage in order to titillate their audience and sell them booklets on commission (86).
Although Clymer quotes from each of the three IWW pamphlets mentioned above, it is only to dismiss their plain statements in favor of a new-historicist orthodoxy that finds that the authors were engaged in an “ancillary but equally important struggle within language itself for control over the terms of cultural debate….Smith, Trautman, and Flynn were also trying to exercise power through language” (200). Surely, there needs no ghost from purgatory to tell us this. Trying to exercise power through language is what all serious writers do. This truism does not pre-empt the plain words of Salvatore Salerno in his introduction to the collection:
The IWW was not, strictly speaking, pacifist in outlook, but its spokespersons and literature consistently opposed those marxists and anarchists who proposed armed struggle….
As the pamphlets reprinted reproduced in this volume attest, the IWW notions of direct action and sabotage are also firmly within the framework of nonviolence, for they have absolutely nothing to do with any form of life-threatening "terrorism" or personal injury. (1)
The best summary here may be the one that Clymer cites from an editorial in the IWW newspaper Solidarity: “Our dynamite is mental” (187). Though this last phrase might have served to introduce Covington Hall, Clymer instead choose a 1913 article in the Industrial Worker in which Justus Ebert of Brooklyn NY (unnamed by Clymer) pronounces that Hall “personifies the poetic spirit of the revolution better than any man in the movement today.” In what follows, Clymer seems to have elided the qualifier “poetic.” It is to be wished that he had lingered on it and perhaps read the whole of Ebert’s article with sustained attention, for it quickly segues to the ancient topos of madness as “the gift of poets.” Ebert cites Michael Drayton’s encomium on Marlowe:
...his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear;
For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.
Clymer’s rhetoric, however, has its own take on madness, not the poet’s fine frenzy but rather a lunacy comparable to the public’s perception of a terrorist bomber.
He finds this lunacy paramount in "Us the Hoboes and the Dreamers," the most frequently printed of Hall’s poems. It appears in all three of Hall’s collections, as his single poem in the Marcus collection, and in Roediger brief anthology at the end of his edition of Labor Struggles. But to call it, as Clymer does, "one of the most vicious in Hall's oeuvre," is to misread it. Clymer is surely darkening the poem in the cloud cover of his thesis about the threat (embodied or perceived) in IWW rhetoric.
“Us the Hoboes and the Dreamers”
Instead of giving weight to the ancient notion of poetic frenzy, which Ebert hints at in quoting Drayton, Clymer is a literalist of the imagination: “The idea of acting ‘crazy,’ going berserk, and wildly threatening scabs is absolutely integral to Covington Hall’s most powerful poetry . . . ,” and it is this proposal which introduces “Us the Hoboes and the Dreamers.”
We shall laugh to scorn your power that now holds the South in awe.
We shall trample on your customs, we shall spit upon your law.
We shall come up from our shanties to your burdened banquet hall--
We shall turn your wine to wormwood, your honey into gall.
We shall go where wail the children, where, from your race-killing mills,
Flows a bloody stream of profits to your curst, insatiate tills;
We shall tear from them your drivers in our shamed and angered pride,
In the fierce and frenzied fury of a fatherhood denied. . . .
We shall strip them of their epaulets, the panderers who fight
Your wars against the workers for a bone on which to bite.
We shall batter down your prisons, we shall set your chain gangs free,
We shall drive you from the mountainside, the valley, plain and sea.
We shall hunt around the fences where your oxmen sweat and gape,
Till they stampede down your stockades in their panic to escape;
We shall steal up through the darkness, we shall prowl the wood and town,
Till they waken to their power and arise and ride you down.
We shall send the message to them on a whisper down the night,
And shall cheer as warrior women drive your helots to the fight;
We shall use your guile against you, all the cunning you have taught,
All the wisdom of the serpent to attain the ending sought.
We shall come as comes the cyclone--in the stillness we shall form--
From the calm your terror has fashioned we shall hurl on you the storm;
We shall strike when least expected, when you deem Toil’s rout complete,
And crush you and your gunmen ‘neath our brogan-shodded feet.
We shall laugh to scorn your power that now holds the South in awe,
We shall trample on your customs, we shall spit upon your law;
We shall outrage all your temples, we shall blaspheme all your gods--
We shall turn your slavepen over as the plowman turns the clods.
Clymer finds this “one of the most vicious in Hall’s oeuvre,” but what a less thesis-driven reading would reveal, it seems to me, is first that the writer demonstrates marked control of his material through his double-tetrameter quatrains with their heavy ictus subduing the stormy language to a view consonant with the non-violent stance of the IWW, and second that the poem ends with a metaphor from agriculture that is at once striking and irenic.
In Clymer's forced reading, "the wisdom of the serpent" is expected to be recognized by Hall's readers as a code for sabotage. The serpent “evokes the biblical serpent as a cunning deliverer” [sic!--surely the word is deceiver], but “the poem’s original readers would have recognized in the serpent an allusion to Hall’s favorite symbol of sabotage” (206). It is likely enough that some of Hall's IWW readers would have associated the serpent with sabotage, and the rattlesnake image of sabotage did appear frequently in Hall’s paper Voice of the People. But the image was not always employed in Clymer’s sense of sabotage but the converse, as in Solidarity for April 1917, where it carries the caption, “Don’t wear sabots; it hurts the snake” (Kornbluh 60). It also appeared in the Industrial Worker, a publication to which Hall was a frequent contributor, and on the front cover of Salerno’s Direct Action & Sabotage, one of Clymer sources.
Exploitation
The larger number of Hall’s readers, however, part of a nation of Bible readers, would first have recalled Jesus's injunction in the Book of Matthew to "be wise as serpents, innocent as doves,” a combination of characteristics that recalls the dual meaning of the word sabotage. Given that the Bible is the largest source of Hall's rhetoric throughout his work, the Bible certainly outweighs the IWW and was more likely to resonate in his reader's hearts. What we have in Hall, I would argue, is a figure like Blake, who reads the Bible against the grain, but whose level of cultural reference is still Biblical. The poem is in the exhortative mode, and as such it belongs to the tradition of the Jeremiad, and to the prophetic tradition from Jeremiah to Blake. Poem after poem in this first collection draws on Biblical imagery.
Clymer is surely allowing his sabotage-thesis to ride rough over his interpretive skills: he states that Hall “organized a secret terrorist group” (201), makes reference to “his poetry’s frequent return to violence” (201), refers to the “timber beasts” who were Hall’s constituents in Louisiana (201), and he states that Hall “idolized the Ku Klux Klan” (203). The broadest answer to these derogations would be to note that the poem is not in the imperative mood but rather in the future tense, speaking the language of dream and vision. For purposes of comparison, it would be more proper to invoke the dream-vision of Piers Plowman rather than the screeds of the Uni-Bomber.
Furthermore--and here we come to the importance of biography--read in context, the poem turns out to be a highly regional in its rhetoric, which turns on Hall’s vision of his beloved, natal South. The biographical context is already clear in the prose epigraph Hall added to later printings of the poem: “Written when we Lumberjacks, Sodbusters, Hoboes, and Dreamers were fighting the Lumber Barons of Louisiana and Texas, with our backs to the wall, back in 1910-1914.” Clymer quotes this epigraph but makes nothing of it. The biographical sketch above has already noted Hall’s Southern heritage and the desire to ultimately rejoin it expressed in his choice of the cemetery he would lie in. But there is more to it than that, as David Roediger, the scholar who has most thoroughly investigated the matter, points out.
Roediger argues that an influential body of historical work exists describing the South in the United States as existing in a colonial relationship to the North or, at the least, having a separate national existence of its own. This may take the form of a pointed reference to the American Civil War as the “War for Southern Independence” or to an emphasis on the postbellum relationship of economic dependency on Northern capital. Roediger argues that whatever the pros and cons of this position, “it is striking that over the century following the Civil War very few Southerners involved in labour and socialist struggles attempted to ground a case for Southern socialism within a characterization of their region as an oppressed nation. This article is about one who did (“Poetry and Politics” 162).
Throughout this long tenure as an organizer and poet, Hall was practically alone on the American left in arguing for Southern nationalism. He repeatedly referred to the South as an internal colony of the United States, as the “First Conquered Province of the American Plutocratic Empire” (LSDS 208). This is what the first line of “Us the Hoboes” means when it speaks of the South “held in awe.” Clymer calls the effect of this line “chilling,“ but the fact of the matter is that Hall felt no awe--he just saw the North as a foreign country.
Roediger notes that Hall’s analysis is not so different from that offered in more recent histories of the slave South by Eugene Genovese and of the New South by C. Vann Woodward. But Hall is noteworthy for the two striking ways in which he recast and used his Southern heritage. The first involves the race issue, in which area Roediger is the acknowledged expert. Since race doesn’t concern my argument, the curious reader must go to Roediger. I would like to focus on the second way, the manner in which Hall used the figure of the rebel.
In his twenties, Hall’s growing interest in socialism developed hand in hand with an organization dedicated to commemorating Confederate soldiers, the United Sons of Confederate Veterans. Oscar Ameringer’s 1940 autobiography portrays Hall’s resignation from this group as a turn towards “underdogdom”--a nice word--and contends that Hall quit because he was “tired of advertising the fact that his father had made an ass of himself by fighting for slaves he might have sold to the Yanks and still kept as sharecroppers” (209). Ameringer’s explanation of Hall’s resignation from the USCV is uncertain, as other sources suggest he was expelled. However it may have been, Hall retained a penchant for memorializing those who, in his view, fought gamely for a time, and then were overwhelmed. He gloried in constructing a lineage of bloodied but unbowed “rebels,” “madmen,” “hoboes,” and “dreamers,” beginning with Lucifer and Jesus and stretching to Abraham Lincoln and Eugene V. Debs, as itemized in the first poem (“Rebellion,” discussed above) in his first book.
Thus, what is special about Hall’s “rebel” and his “rebellion” is not its Byronic or Blakean romanticism but its Americanism--or, rather, Southernism--for Halls rebels were those who fought in the War of the Rebellion, and these are the giant figures (never named) who give resonance to the names of labor activists--past, future, and imagined--invoked by Hall. If the egalitarian Hall has any feeling for the KKK, as Clymer states he does, it is explained by this sentimental attachment to the figure of the Southern rebel, beaten but unbowed.
To return to the poem in question, “Us the Hoboes” should be read along side a similar poem in the early pages of Hall’s first collection. First, however, another preliminary step is called for, and that is to describe the book.
Songs of Rebellion, 1915
Published in New Orleans in 1915, Songs of Rebellion is divided into three parts: seventeen poems in an eponymous opening section, twenty poems in a middle section called “Songs of Love,” and a final section of seventeen poems grouped as Miscellaneous. Three of the love poems are addressed to his sister Isabel (Mary Elizabeth Hall), who died in 1902. It is surely she who is behind the gothic-font statement on the front cover: “To the Rebel Workers of the World, with whom I have served so long, and to all the Dear Girls I have loved so well, this book, containing the Heart and Soul of Covington Hall, is dedicated.” The poems in the last section are sentimental, some even in moonlight-and-magnolia blackface, and Hall never reprinted them. Even so we may wonder at the sentimentality of this front-cover epigraph in a book that Clymer claims to bristle with rhetorical violence.
The poem that I would compare with “Us the Hoboes” is the book’s second poem, “Why I Am a Revolutionist,” whose title seems to promise to tell the whole secret of the poet’s motivation,but which in an even more marked way features a violent rhetoric subdued to a note of peace. The poem comprises nine quatrains of fourteeners rhymed in unison (aaaa, bbbb, etc.). The first five are statements delineating the sorrow and suffering the poet has witnessed. Perhaps the two most moving deal with his parents, comprising the only autobiographical moment in Hall’s poetry.
And I’ve seen my father lying on his death-bed like a beast,
In his poverty forsaken, he a Southron soldier-priest;
Seen his broken body tremble as the pulse of living ceased,
And his soul go outward, moaning, as the red sun lit the East.
And I’ve seen my little mother and her death bed weep and moan,
For the babies she was leaving in the great world all alone;
Heard her loving spirit crying, seeking something to atone--
How she feared the god of hunger!--how she feared the heart of stone!
The next stanzas of this passage deal with his mother on her death bed, telling how the poet
Heard her loving spirit crying, seeking something to atone--
How she feared the god of hunger!--How she feared the heart of stone!
The two stanzas that follow report the words of a plural “you” who talk of “religion,” and “deplore” rebellion, capitalist exploiters “who rape the starving millions and yet grasp for more and more.” In such “wild and frightful moments” the poet has felt his reason reel, felt “an impulse like the tiger’s” (Clymer’s “going berserk”) steal over all his being, making him feel that killing “would not be murder” if his own hand could deal the blow.
Then I heard a voice crying, “Workers of the world, unite!”
And the vanguard of the Marxians broke upon my hopeless sight,
Serried ranks of Rebels marching ‘neath the crimson flag of right,
To call our class to action, to arouse it to its might.
Thoughts of murder vanished from me and demon ceased to reign,
For the scheme of life unraveled and the universe seemed sane;
And I took my place beside them, here upon Truth’s battle plain,
And I stand beside them fighting till the world we lose or gain.
By the poet’s own confession, this is a Damascus Road moment, but it is a call to battle--to fight, to rebel--not to dynamite. It specifically rejects the impulse to murder.
Among the hundreds of poems scattered over the battlefields of Hall’s life, one more calls attention to itself by its placement as the first poem in both the 1946 Battle Hymns of Toil and in Roediger’s selected poems, Dreams and Dynamite. Called “Dedication,” it too is a statement of poetics, and it feels like a late one. Consequently, it may serve as a final poem in the present study.
If the reader asks, “Dedication to what?,” the poem doesn’t reply. Thus the sense of the word must be the writer’s own dedication, that is his dedication to his task. In form it follows Hall’s popular style of fully rhymed quatrains but the line is pentameter. If the quatrain spacing were removed, it would appear as heroic couplets, confirming our sense that there is a touch of the eighteenth-century in the poem’s slow, meditative movement and in its pastoral motif of wisdom found among the humble. These formal characteristics imply the poem is not intended for a popular audience, and the opening line states as much.
This, too, I found, that Thought needs Solitude;
It cannot function ‘midst the Great or Rude;
Like love, it is not bartered, sold, nor bought,
And often does it come unasked, unsought.
Oft in the Tenant Farmers’ humble shacks,
Or in the deep wood with the Lumberjacks,
Or in some Miner’s cabin, there the word
Expressing what some Rare Soul thought, I heard.
There in the Jungles where the Untamed dwell,
Or far beside some lonely desert well,
Or in some mist-roofed valley, I have bent
And ear to those the Press no Page has lent.
There ‘mongst us, arguing on This and That,
One of the Seventh often came and sat;
Strange men who through the ages truth had sought,
It was from these I learned what no Book taught.
This is not exhortation, Hall’s usual style, but rather lyric, the poet overheard as he speaks to himself. He speaks of what he has learned--not sabotage but but a capacity to feel for the humble.
Abbreviations:
ND Nelson, “The Diversity of American Poetry”
LSDS Hall, Labor Struggles in the Deep South
NRR Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery
NRM Nelson, Revolutionary Memory
Bibliography
Ameringer, Oscar. If You Don’t Weaken: The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer. Foreword by Carl Sandburg. New York: Henry Holt, 1940.
Clymer, Jeffory A. America’s Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 2003.
Cullen, Countee, ed. Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets. 1927; Secaucus NJ: Citadel Press, 1993.
Ebert, Justus. “Covington Hall: An Appreciation of His Works at the Port of the Revolution.” The Industrial Worker, 15 May 1913.
Foner, Philip, ed. American Labor Songs in the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1975.
Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley. Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers' Industrial Efficiency. IWW pamphlet, 1916. Reprinted in Direct Action and Sabotage, ed. with intro. by Salvatore Salerno. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2014.
Graham, John, ed. “Yours for the Revolution”: The Appeal to Reason, 1895-1922. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1990.
Graham, Marcus, ed. An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry. New York: The Active Press, 1929.
Green, James R. “The Brotherhood of Timber Workers 1910-1913: A Radical Response to Industrial Capitalism in the Southern U.S.A.” Past & Present 60 (1973) 161-200.
_____. Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest 1895-1943. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1978.
Hall, Covington. Battle Hymns of Toil. Ed. Ira M. Finley. Oklahoma City: General Welfare Reporter, 1946.
_____. Dreams and Dynamite: Selected Poems. Ed. David Roediger. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co. 1985.
_____. Labor Struggles in the Deep South & Other Writings. Ed. David Roediger. Labor Classics. Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1999.
_____. Rhymes of a Rebel. New Llano LA: Llano Co-operative Colony Printery, 1931.
_____. Songs of Rebellion. New Orleans: John J. Weihing Printing Co., n.d. [1915].
I.W.W. Songs: To Fan the Flames of Discontent. Facsimile Reprint of Nineteenth Edition, 1923. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publ. Co., 1989.
Kornbluh, Joyce, ed. Introduction by Joyce Kornbluh. Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP., 1964.
Nekola, Charlotte, and Paula Rabinowitz, eds. Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940. Foreword by Toni Morrison. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1993.
Nelson, Cary. “The Diversity of American Poetry.” Columbia Literary History of the
United States. Columbia UP, 1987.
_____. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945. Madison WI: Wisconsin UP, 1989.
_____. Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. New York: Routledge, 2001.
_____ and Bartholomew Brinkman. Modern American Poetry. Online edition: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/index.htm.
Rodman, Selden. A New Anthology of American Poetry. The Modern Library. New York: Random House, 1938.
Roediger, David R. Introduction to Hall’s Dreams and Dynamite. This same essay appears as an article for the History Workshop Journal (19 [1985] 162-68), except there it is called “The Poetry and Politics of Southern Nationalism and Labour Radicalism” and footnoted.
_____. Toward the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History. NY: Verso, 1994.
Smith, Walker C. Sabotage: Its History, Philosophy & Function. IWW pamphlet, 1913. Reprinted in Direct Action and Sabotage, ed. with intro. by Salvatore Salerno. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2014.
Thompson, Fred. The IWW, Its First Fifty Years, 1905-1955. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015073497490;view=1up;seq=91. Accessed 29 May 2015.
Trautman, William E. Direct Action and Sabotage. IWW pamphlet, 1912. Reprinted in Direct Action and Sabotage, ed. with intro. by Salvatore Salerno. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2014.
Veterans of Industry of America. Oklahoma Historical Society. http://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=VE007. Accessed 20 May 2015.
Posts
