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We’ll say goodbye to the “Red Scare Next Door” in Evansville, Indiana and travel East to the Green Mountains of Vermont where it turns out that even Republicans can be Red-Baited. We can turn the page in the anti-labor playbook but all we’ll find is the same old story featuring Henry Wallace, the Communist Party, …

Evansville College Professor George Parker and Henry Wallace

The "Red Scare," often called McCarthyism, went much deeper than what was directed by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s and had, even as early as the late 1940s, a broad reach into the states. Local “scares” were often instigated by individuals, mini-McCarthys, who would red-bait state and city politics. But this “fear of communism” in the backyard, like that at the national level, was often cover and distraction for the real conservative agenda...busting up the labor unions which had gained strength before and during WWII.

Joining us today is Randy Mills, professor of History at Oakland City University and author of numerous articles and books on Indiana and regional history. Oakland City is about 25 miles from Evansville, Indiana, which, it turns out, has a unique place in labor history being home to what is thought to be the first firing of a university professor for political opinions.

Evansville was a major center of industrial production, reviving the regional economy after the Great Depression through war production. The Plymouth factory, for example, turned out "bullets by the billions," and Evansville produced over 6,000 P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes. After the war, Evansville's manufacturing base was booming and the town was dubbed the refrigerator capital of the world.

Also enjoying this boom was Evansville College (later the University of Evansville) where enrollment grew from about 400 during the Great Depression to 1,500 in 1946 and the curriculum shifted to serve the local industry, converting human resources, GIs, from war fodder, to labor fodder.

State Troopers at the Bucyrus-Erie Strike

Our show focuses primarily on the years 1947 and 48; on the firing of Philosophy and Religion professor George Parker for his association with Progressive Party Presidential candidate Henry Wallace; On the making of a labor leader, Charles Wright, head of Local 813 in the deeply conservative and reactionary Coal Country; on a major strike at the mining equipment plant of the Bucyrus-Erie company; and on the union-busting energies of business leaders, happy to use the “red scare” to malign recalcitrant workers seeking some measure of their version of the good life.

Individuals matter in the making of history: you and I can go along or go against. It’s hard to go against, especially when so much money and power is allayed against you and can turn your community against you as well. Charles Wright found that out. George Parker found that out. These men chose a side. So did Lincoln Hale, the President of Evansville College. So did the Evansville corporate executives Louis Ruthenberg and N. R. Knox. These men were not, of course, run out of town.

GUEST

Randy Mills is Professor of History at Oakland City University and and author of numerous articles and books on Indiana and regional history, including his most recent book, Summer Wind: A Soldiers Road from Indiana to Vietnam, co-authored with his wife Roxanne.

RELATED

"The Real Violence at Evansville": The Firing of Professor George F. Parker by Randy Mills

MUSIC

"Which Side Are You On," performed by Natalie Merchant

"Get That Communist, Joe," by the Kavaliers

"You Gotta Go Down and Join the Union," by Woody Guthrie

"Jefferson and Liberty" performed by Pete Seeger

"Song of My Hands," performed by Barbara Dane

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Edited by Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

The “Red Scare,” often called McCarthyism, went much deeper than what was directed by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s and had, even as early as the late 1940s, a broad reach into the states. Local “scares” were often instigated by individuals, mini-McCarthys, who would red-bait state and city politics. But this “fear of …

We open with the jazz tune, "Epistrophy," from Eric Dolphy’s Last Date recorded in Holland in 1964. Epistrophe, from the Greek, means “a turning about” - and applied to The Young One, a constant shift of moral perspective with no settled view.

As with our recent show on the 1954 Salt of the Earth, here is another “forgotten film” that seems a kind of impossibility. Made by a Spanish filmmaker, The Young One is set in the rural south off the Carolina coast (but filmed near Acapulco) at the height of the civil rights movement. It’s produced by an American, based on a story by an American writer, scripted with a Canadian-American who had been blacklisted by Hollywood, using American actors. The film’s principal point of view is that of a black jazz clarinetist named Traver on the run from a lynching over the false accusation of raping a white woman. And that’s not the half of it.

Key Meersman (Evvie) and Bernie Hamilton (Traver)

La Joven, or The Young One, is very loosely based on a Peter Matthiessen short story from 1957 called “Travelin’ Man.” Matthiessen’s story is a simplistic (if horrifying) hide and seek narrative (a "most dangerous game") where a white hunter stalks and is stalked by a black chain gang escapee...all action, tension, and release. La Joven offers deeper characterization as well as a shift in focus, via the title, from Traver, the Travelin’ Man, to Evalyn, or Evvie, the "young one." And it’s how the men in the movie “hunt” (or present as fathers for the orphaned) Evvie, that makes this a work of critical depth. We learn who these men are through their responses to Evvie; and we learn about a culture, ours, where this is status quo.

Throughout the show we’ll return to Eric Dolphy’s music, choosing songs where he plays both the soprano and bass clarinet — think of it as a stand-in for Traver.

Luis Buñuel

Called "an iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary…” Bunuel is probably best known in the US for his 1972 film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which one the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. For 48 years his work challenged conventional attitudes about society, undermined bourgeois optimism and forced audiences to doubt the tenets of the established order.

We begin with a bit of the nomadic Bunuel biography before finding our way to the movie proper and a consideration of how the racist and misogynistic hierarchies presented in a 58-year-old movie have yet to be overcome.

GUEST

Jonathan Risner, Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University in Bloomington. His book Blood Circuits: Contemporary Argentine Horror Cinema is forthcoming from SUNY Press.

RELATED

Buñuel’s Neglected Masterpiece by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Undermining Zinctown: The Feminist Socialism of Salt of the Earth (Interchange)

Eric Dolphy

MUSIC

"Epistrophy," by Eric Dolphy (Last Date)

"Something Sweet, Something Tender," Eric Dolphy (Out To Lunch)

"What Love," Charles Mingus, ft. Eric Dolphy (Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus)

"Sinner Man," The Swan Silvertones (Newport Jazz Festival, 1959)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

We open with the jazz tune, “Epistrophy,” from Eric Dolphy’s Last Date recorded in Holland in 1964. Epistrophe, from the Greek, means “a turning about” – and applied to The Young One, a constant shift of moral perspective with no settled view. As with our recent show on the 1954 Salt of the Earth, here …

This is the special 90-minute finale for our series A Targeted Divide. It’s called "What Bullets do to Bodies and Lives: Structural Violence, Firearms, and Surviving Gunshot Wounds."

We know a lot about gun homicide, much less about what life is like for the wounded living: What happens to those who get shot, but live? How does the arc of their lives bend? And what are the roles of race, poverty, and opportunity in all of this?

Our program covers a lot of ground, but chiefly we’re interested in common misconceptions about gun violence as portrayed in both the media, and that includes Hollywood and the music industry, as well as in policy prescriptions. We are daily confronted with false or misleading representations of gun violence in the US; there is the glamorized “movie” version that romanticizes the gunshot victim who survives as a kind of hero, a tough with street cred; there is the perception that mass shootings with semi-automatic weapons are the major consequence of gun culture; and that gunshot victims primarily die. We’ll dispel all of these tonight.

We’ll also look at the way healthcare institutions further victimize those wounded by bullets by assuming they deserved the injury. This pervasive moralism further exacerbates the pain of living with the after effects of being shot by literally withholding proper pain control medication and follow-up treatment for complications and psychological trauma.

To start, guest Jooyoung Lee tells us about how his first project studying rap culture in L.A. opened up a view into the world of the gunshot victim when one of his subjects, Flawliss, got shot. Watching what Flawliss went through led to his second project: studying lives lived after a bullet rips apart their body and their idea of who they are.

How one goes about that kind of research is important to clarify. This is the work of ethnography, or as Lee calls it, deep hanging out, a kind of extended journalism. The goal being to challenge the prevailing understanding of a phenomenon.

Jooyoung Lee. Photo by Evan Doheny.

GUEST

Jooyoung Lee is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Blowin’ Up: Rap Dreams in South Central, an ethnographic study on the careers of aspiring rappers from Los Angeles; and he is currently working on a book with the tentative title Ricochet, another ethnographic study, this one on the individual- and community-health effects of gunshot victimization in Philadelphia.

RELATED

Gunning Down the Bill of Rights (A Targeted Divide)

Crime, Decline, and the Rise of the Citizen-Protector (A Targeted Divide)

MUSIC

"Young Black America" by Meek Mill

"Block Episode" by Masta Ace

"Stray Bullet" by Organized Confusion

"Love’s Gonna Get’cha" by Boogie Down Productions

"When the Gun Draws" by Pharoahe Monch

"Clap (One Day)" byPharoahe Monch

"Stand Your Ground" by Pharoahe Monch

"Heaven or Hell" by Meek Mill

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Co-producer: Robert Crouch

Music selections: Jooyoung Lee and Rasul Mowatt

Edited by Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

This is the special 90-minute finale for our series A Targeted Divide. It’s called “What Bullets do to Bodies and Lives: Structural Violence, Firearms, and Surviving Gunshot Wounds.” We know a lot about gun homicide, much less about what life is like for the wounded living: What happens to those who get shot, but live? …

For our second show in our three-part series, A Targeted Divide, we bring you "Crime, Decline, and the Rise of the Citizen-Protector: How the Meaning of Citizenship Is Changing in a Nation Awash in Firearms."

In response to economic decline and reductions in services provided by the state, some men are taking the role of the state into their own hands, and in the name of a citizenship based on masculinist protection, showing us what the future of security services might look like.

Our GUEST is Jennifer Carlson, an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona, whose work focuses on gun politics, policing and public law enforcement, the politics of race and gender, and violence. She’s the author of Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline, published by Oxford University Press. The book draws on in-depth interviews and participant observation at firearms classes, activist events, shooting ranges, and online gun forums, to examine the growing popularity of gun carry among American men, especially in communities of economic decline.

SEGMENT ONE

We begin with why Michigan became Carlson’s locus of study and turn towards the politics of white, male, middle class America. We’ll also learn what it means to think carrying a gun makes you a Sheepdog.

SEGMENT TWO

Guns are felt to answer some problems and we would do well to think about what those problems are. It’s an American option that opens up political space for the monopolizing influence of the NRA where carrying a gun translates to a moral good. But thinking in terms of the NRA perhaps blinds us to the dailiness of our gun-saturated culture.

SEGMENT THREE

How to transform the gun debate. Imagining what security and protection look like...what are we willing to give up and endorse to have it? The transition from hunting to self-defense as the reason for owning guns.

RELATED

Four Questions: Jennifer Carlson on the American Gun Debate

Gunning Down the Bill of Rights (A Targeted Divide)

MUSIC

"You Got to Be a Man" by The Sheepdogs

"Saturday Night Special" by Lynyrd Skynyrd

"Gun Control" by Ian Hunter

"Both Sides of the Gun" by Ben Harper

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

For our second show in our three-part series, A Targeted Divide, we bring you “Crime, Decline, and the Rise of the Citizen-Protector: How the Meaning of Citizenship Is Changing in a Nation Awash in Firearms.” In response to economic decline and reductions in services provided by the state, some men are taking the role of …

Today we begin a series of three programs on Guns in the USA we’re calling a A Targeted Divide.

Our first show is "Gunning Down the Bill of Rights," how the 2nd Amendment trumps the 1st. After a Supreme Court decision in 2008, the most ambiguous and poorly written of our constitutional amendments now means what the NRA wants it to mean: all citizens have an individual right to own and bear arms, regardless of their membership in a militia.

That Court Decision was The District of Columbia v. Heller. It was given greater, more expansive force in 2010 in the case McDonald v The City of Chicago which held that the 2008 Heller decision must be applied to the states.

Our guest, IU Law Professor Jody Madeira, is currently involved in a research project assessing how Americans talk about firearms and associated benefits, risks, rights, and regulations. In an opinion piece written after the February 14th shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were murdered, Madeira wrote, “our elected officials tweeted and posted the usual 'thoughts and prayers' rhetoric to shut down conversations about why such terrifying events occur with such frequency.” She continues:

Our unwillingness to talk about guns and gun violence has even made it easy for states to make such discourse downright unlawful. Indiana state law, for example, bars public and private employers from asking employees about whether they own, use, or transport a gun, with no public safety exception. If they do, they can be slapped with a civil suit for economic damages, court costs, and even punitive damages.

Using the Second Amendment as a silencer bastardizes it, undermining the civil discourse essential to democracy, creating and reinforcing a flawed narrative that fundamentally changes what people think gun ownership is about and warps popular understandings of the Second Amendment.

Today’s show explores that “flawed narrative.”

Segment One

The historical and contextual interpretations of the First and Second Amendments to our Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

Segment Two

The 2008 Supreme Court Decision that finally “negated” that pesky phrase about a “well-regulated militia” in the Second Amendment; “originalism” and “loose construction”; the power of the NRA in shaping law to suit the obscenely powerful and profitable munitions industry.

Segment Three

Having a “right” does not preclude that “right” being regulated; the controversial Florida case nicknamed "Docs v. Glocks" that barred doctors from asking patients any questions about their exposure to firearms.

GUEST

Jody Madeira of Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. A scholar exploring the ways emotion inflects the creation and interpretation of law, Madeira is the author of the books, Killing McVeigh: The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure, and Taking Baby Steps: How Patients and Fertility Clinics Collaborate in Conception.

RELATED

When the Second Amendment threatens the First, mass shootings are more likely by Jody Madeira

In Defense of Looseness by Richard Posner (The New Republic, 8/27/08)

Court rejects Florida’s ‘Docs vs. Glocks’ law (Miami Herald)

A Win for Free Speech and Gun Safety (New York Times)

District of Columbia v. Heller