Proleterian Literature & the Red Dragons with Devin O'Shea (E280)
A paranoid, red scare conspiracy theory about a Japanese ultra-nationalist gang aiming to unite the African American population and overthrow the U.S. government. A flourishing proleterian literature scene driven to madness by the FBI. This strange story is brought to us by journalist and writer Devin Thomas O'Shea and set in Saint Louis, Missouri in the 1930's.
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Devin O'Shea: https://x.com/devintoshea / https://linktr.ee/devintoshea
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (http://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
http://qaapodcast.com
QAA was formerly known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Episode 280, Proletarian Lit and the Black Dragons.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Devin O'Shea, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Hello, sweet, dear, wonderful listeners.
This week, we've got a very special treat for you.
One of my absolute favorite guest writers on the podcast, the St.
Louis legend himself, Devin O'Shea.
The crowd is going wild.
The crowd is going wild.
The St.
Louis crowd is going wild.
I'm seeing some handkerchiefs with blood on them.
There's a lot of gunshots.
Devin is being carried up onto the gallows.
We don't know what's going to happen next, folks.
How you doing, man?
I'm doing great.
How are you boys doing today?
Not too shabby.
Pretty good.
Ready to jump into our episode this week, which touches ultimately on a conspiracy theory about a supposed Japanese ultra-nationalist gang called the Black Dragons, who, it was said, were aiming to unite the African-American population and overthrow the American government.
Which, if you're a listener from a certain part of Virginia or in, like, a field office of some sort, we want to be clear that we totally oppose and sounds very not cool.
Set in the 1930s, this story involves working-class writers, a deranged FBI, and good ol' American Red Scare paranoia.
So get in the breadline, because we're serving QAA soup.
Devin, take it away, baby.
Thank you so much, Julian.
Jack Conray and H.H.
Lewis were two Missouri guys born into a cast of disposable people who were bred to toil in the dirt all their lives.
And for most of history, that was the story.
Then industrialization happened, and now dirt farmers could move to the city and die mangled in factory years instead of work to death in the soil.
And since Jude the Obscure, novels have been telling the story of young men as travelers in this modernizing transition.
To mature meant to go from provincialism to urbanity, from the ignorance and innocence of nature and planted fields to the cold knowing of the city.
That's exactly the kind of shit that gets you in trouble.
But it's what convinced young H.H.
Lewis, a farmer's son with poetic ambition, to travel down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.
And from there, he caught the Union Pacific to Los Angeles in the 1920s, where Lewis ended up where all artistic midwestern teenagers end up, destitute on Skid Row.
Of living in an L.A.
Flophouse, Lewis wrote, "Your breath warmed somebody's neck and somebody's breath warmed
yours. I had to pry myself from between two side sleepers packed against me. Stiff, numb,
almost paralyzed by the damp coldness and the bare floor. I then had to pound myself and stretch like
a dope fiend before being able to stand." Julian always has to pound himself when he's waking up.
I do like to pound myself.
Stretch like a dope fiend.
I love that.
That's when you've been around too many dope fiends where you're like, you know, stretching.
What the dope fiends do.
Exactly.
Louis woke one morning in the flophouse and saw something that changed his life forever.
A man he'd been sleeping near had drank too much canned heat, or denatured alcohol, and the guy passed away on the floor at Louis' feet, in front of him.
Our novice poet described the man's last sound as a gurgling and phlegmy ah.
Boys, could you give me your best gurgling and phlegmy ah?
That's very good.
[slurping]
Oh wow.
Really for long.
Jake's going too far with it, Everybody's just pulling their little headphones out.
Yeah, we guarantee you we repulse you at least one time during each podcast episode.
People don't like mucus bubbling?
Come on!
Harold Hardwell Lewis was nicknamed Bug by his schoolmates in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, which is an area of my state known as the Boot Heel.
The Boot Heel is that little Missouri square sunk into the top right corner of Arkansas near the Mississippi River, and this area's soil was known as Gumbo because of the silty and sticky texture.
Lewis left the gumbo because he wanted to become a writer and see the world, and the trains had made that suddenly possible.
It's a history dork thing to harp on, but railways are insanely, insanely important to understanding the psychology of the turn of the century.
Trains multiply the area the average human could traverse in one lifetime by a factor of 100, and that'll come up again, I swear.
From Skid Row, Lewis returned to Missouri broke and traumatized.
He was convinced that the wealthy would never do anything to alleviate the suffering of the poor people he saw massing in the cities.
And so H.H.
Lewis became a communist poet and wondered, in verse, Oh, how can I struggle and win through the strife, looking up a mule's prat all my life?
What's a prat?
I think that's an asshole.
It's a butt?
Chris Pratt.
That's what Chris Pratt is named after.
That's awesome that if you go back in history long enough that guy's name is just Chris Asshole.
That's part of a poem called, poof, no chance to be president.
I love this guy.
I think that's the title of Rachel Maddow's segment tonight.
The Road to Utterly became Lewis's most famous work, which was a long poem about a utopian community.
Utterly is the terminus for all the underground currents in American socialism as they finally materialize in a place.
Course that blindly forward wends, while another hope impends.
Through the worst-to-be, trending as a river trends, even with the backward bends towards the sea.
Till the profit system ends, that's the road to Utterly.
This is a cautionary tale for all the communist poets out there.
Listen up, junkie.
Lewis died penniless in a shack in a field, completely out of his mind with paranoia, and cut off from every friend he ever had.
He was driven from his livelihood and sanity by the FBI at the very beginning of the Cold War.
Many in the American proletarian literary movement suffered similar fates, and there's a rich vein of history around this sort of artistic movement that is yet to be fully recovered.
And could prove useful for that poem, novel, or whatever you've been working on.
Yeah, if you want to be hounded by the FBI, listen to Devin over here.
You know, you too could be destitute.
This is a, yeah, easy step-by-step, here's how to get on a really bad list procedural.
Although I suppose this generation would have to do proletarian TikToks.
That's right.
There's gonna be a dance involved.
I have a feeling that one of the hosts from this podcast will most likely end up dying penniless in a shack in a field somewhere.
I don't know which one, but odds are one of us will perish that way.
Why would you say that about Travis?
It's not fair.
No, Travis would thrive penniless in a shack in a field.
No, that's where his life begins.
No, I'm talking about me or Julian.
Travis, on his spare time, is seeking that shack.
Yeah, you would go to visit Travis out in that penniless shack in the middle of nowhere and he would have a full line of crops already growing.
He would have made a rain catcher.
He would have reinforced the walls.
Yeah, he would have his little fallout shack built and he'd have mute fruit growing and all that.
He'd have power armor also.
It's not talked about in high school English class that much.
The American Proletarian Literary Movement was an aesthetic approach that became immensely popular and was systematically forgotten.
This movement began in the mid-twenties and mostly ended by 1940.
It's a big part of why novels and American Literature, in capital letters, are the way they are today.
The central concern of proletarian writers were the lives of working class people, as opposed to, say, Victorian novels, which concerned the lives of the bourgeois and hardly paid attention to poor people at all.
That's in general.
Can you guys think of any other, like, classic literature that's about poor people?
Um, I'd say The Grapes of Wrath.
I'd say certain Cormac McCarthy novels.
I'd say some of Faulkner.
Of Mice and Men.
Charles Dickens.
Dickens, yeah.
For most of literary history, have-nots and poors inhabited static roles in the background of real drama, real life, real emotion, which was the domain of the aristocracy.
Most poor people in fiction were voyeuristic exercises done by the aristocracy who were sort of peering down on a life that they didn't really understand.
Novels were mostly written for the discussion in parlor scenes of like Paris and London because those people bought books and occasionally read them.
To put it in real simple terms, industrialization accidentally created modernism, which was sort of defined by the capacity to capture bigger sections of the human experience, including the lives and existence of poor people and the working class.
Now, that is a huge oversimplification.
And so is all of this.
But factories made printing cheaper.
And at the same time in America, the Red Menace, working through Reconstruction, had improved the public education for the industrialized proletariat.
That was the radical Republicans who are to blame for that.
It's like the idea that a democracy should have people who know how to read.
It's pretty new.
Yeah, that's gross.
And it's led us here.
Biden's America.
Another macro level thing to note here is that after the Russian Revolution, the Soviet model became the model.
But there were still a million other socialisms cropping up all over the world with robust movements in Germany and England, just as an example.
As the Russian Revolution transitioned into the Soviet Union, there was no more wondering about what a socialist form of government would look like and how it would behave.
And so a way of taking the temperature of the dictatorship of the proletariat it was to check in on art and see what the nerds were up to.
A socialist form of sculpture, music, painting, literature, it was all necessary and it
all needed state funding. Art would be the whetstone to challenge and sharpen the revolution,
and thus the concept of proletarian literature was born with guys like Maximum Gorky and then
became an international movement.
Now that is a name.
It's really Maxim Gorky, but I just always think of him as Maximum Gorky.
It's all of the Gorky turned all the way up.
This might resonate today, but there's a big difference between socialist and left-leaning artists making work for the working class versus the working class being given the resources to make work about themselves.
The latter is way more dangerous to the culture industry.
And this difference is the real essence of proletarian literature.
It was made by people who labored in the day and then hit the typewriter at night.
Do you guys think that sounds sustainable?
No.
You know, you're in the sheet metal factory all day and then you're like, boy, I want to relax by hammering into this machine that puts, like, steel stamps on paper.
Anyway, still, this is a huge idea.
Authorship and the role of editor and writer and publisher are all very powerful positions today, but back then people actually gave a shit about writing, and print was like the primary mode of discourse in the 1920s and 30s.
And so, in New York City, the left influencers and podcasters of their day got together and hatched a plan.
America's communist intellectuals of the time were all based in Union Square, and specifically in the coffeehouses where they all hung out.
They interpreted proletarian literature as a consciousness-raising tool, and acted with a mandate to search out and publish hinterland writers.
Specifically, this New York set we're looking for worker artists who were already operating at the margins and just needed to be put into print.
They wanted a Shakespeare in overalls, as editor Mike Gold said.
These worker stories would be circulated amongst the working class.
Workers would see themselves in art and see the struggle of their lives as on par with Homer's epics or the tragedies of Goethe.
And they would be inspired to fight their oppressors with the suicidal fury of the Light Brigade, or so the theory said.
By the end of it, the New York boys would be writing letters to our sweet gumbo poet H.H.
Lewis, calling him a necrophilic son of a cretin.
Lewis, in turn, was calling them the Coffee Klatsch Klan, or the KKK, in other words, with klatsch meaning a gathering for coffee in German.
A horrible riff would develop between the New York intellectuals and the Heartland writers, with the Red Scare driving everyone absolutely insane and out of work.
But for a time, this little machine worked.
The American publishing apparatus produced a great number of proletarian works, from Mary Adele Lesueur's novels to Tilly Olsen's accounts of working women and the poet Arnaud Bontemps.
And one of my favorites, Richard Wright.
But the showcase proletarian writer of that era is, I would argue, Jack Conroy, a midwestern novelist and editor of The Anvil.
I wrote about him for The Nation, and so here's a summary of all the good parts of that piece.
Jack was born in a coal mining camp called Monkey's Nest, and had a very brief childhood.
Conroy's father was killed while firing shots in a coal mine, which was a suicidal job where you got paid a little better, but you have to set off blasting caps underground, in the darkness, and it was so dangerous that if you successfully retired, it was often without an important limb, or that you've narrowly escaped basically a cave-in.
At the age of 14, Jack's older brother was run down by a train while coming back from his job at the Wabash Rail Station.
That's right, a 14-year-old was coming home from laboring in the rail yard and was run over by a coal-fired steam engine.
Then, Jack Conroy, at age 13, went and began his career as a car toad working in the same Wabash Rail Yard that murdered his brother.
And then he went home, again as a 13-year-old, to his house in the coal mining camp that killed his father.
Conrad got a bit of a literary education through the Free Carnegie Library in Moberly, but books were supplemented by the language of the rail yard.
There was prose scrawled into the insides and the outsides of boxcars, and a lot of it was done by Wobblies, or the international workers of the world, who left revolutionary truisms scratched in the paint.
Wobbly poets like T-Bone Slim wrote some bangers like, Wherever you find injustice, The proper form of politeness is attack.
And?
Only the poor break laws.
The rich evade them.
There were IWW jokes and the lyrics to Joe Hill songs and stories about Casey Jones that all influenced Conroy as he worked his life away in the 20s reading and writing when he could.
Have you guys ever heard the dirty Casey Jones lyrics?
No, please.
No.
They're really bad.
Should I do some bars real quick?
Absolutely.
Please.
Casey Jones was a son of a bitch.
He drove his locomotive into a whorehouse ditch, flew through the door with his pecker in his hand, and said, Step aside, ladies.
I'm a railroad man.
Wow.
Backed off and jacked off.
I think I remember this from the first Ninja Turtles movie.
He couldn't fuck them all. Fucked 97 until his balls turned blue, then backed off, jacked off, and fucked the last few.
Wow, backed off and jacked off. I think I remember this from the first Ninja Turtles movie.
[laughter]
They were like, "Dude, what are you talking about, Casey?"
"Hey man, hey man, stop jacking off on the back of our shells, bro!"
Yeah, that was the R-rated Ninja Turtles movie.
By the time he was 32, labor strife in America had exploded, and people wanted to read about it.
Conroy founded the Rebel Poets Organization, which was a loose affiliation of radical writers, all communicating through the cutting-edge technology of the Postal Service.
This was work that was produced on hand-crank presses in old cow barns and connected by mail, but the Rebel Poets became an international phenomenon, with chapters in England, Germany, France, and Japan.
It functioned sort of like the John Reed Clubs, which were organized by the Communist Party USA, and the idea was the same.
Literacy could help build one big union.
Education could unite anarchists, liberals, communists, Christian socialists, wobblies, populists, and so on.
Theory guided Conroy and his contemporaries, but Conroy claimed that the sight of Das Kapital on a bookshelf across the room was enough to give him a headache.
Conroy would help jumpstart the careers of all kinds of writers, and Rebel Poets included work from people we still remember, like Sherwood Anderson and Langston Hughes.
Lewis Ginsberg, whose work was overshadowed by his son Alan, and the godson of J.P.
Morgan, were all Rebel Poets, and their mission was to awaken the working class.
As Conroy wrote, The American worker is not the clod he seems to be.
He has begun to think.
When he gets into his full stride, his footsteps will shake the earth and tumble down many a gaudy and gilded temple.
This literary problem was not just a search for a Maoist version of Stephen King, who could connect the dots of the class war.
It was also a race against fascism, which was speaking to the masses in a language they were interested in.
Now I'm imagining writing IT, but IT is capital.
IT is like a Landlords.
It's a clown version of all the Landlords in existence.
They eat children, folks!
Look out!
In the early 1930s, Conroy became a contributor to New Masses, a New York publication edited by Mike Gold, who drafted talent from the hinterland in order to wage this aesthetic war against, specifically, Ezra Pound.
Something weird was happening in modernism.
Printing was becoming cheaper, but literary novels and poems were becoming more difficult.
In fact, they were becoming bizarre.
The confusing points of view of Mrs. Dalloway, for example, or the obscure phonic wordplay of Gertrude Stein, or the huge labyrinthian plot of Ulysses that's all contained to one day in Dublin and commemorates a pretty good handjob that Joyce got by a river one day.
That was all very confusing to the average reader.
But high modernism was developing rapidly in Europe, and Ezra Pound's occult version of it was explicitly fascist.
Of Pound's tour of the dictators coming to power in Spain and Italy, and the rise of the American Boond Party at home, Mike Gold wrote, You may yet return triumphantly, Ezra, to a fascist America, and lead a squad that will mystically, rhetorically, but effectively bump off your old friends, the artists and writers of the new masses.
Always ready, but hoping to see you in hell first.
Those are bars.
BBL Ezra!
BBL Ezra!
Yeah, you guys, this is a lot like the Kendrick Drake feud of the day, right?
Listen up, kids.
I'm turning a chair around and sitting down and I'm telling you all about these 1930s guys.
This was a big literary schism of the 1930s, and the big fear was that literature would be taken from the working class because only an intellectual connoisseur could keep up with it.
Conroy wrote that "Eccentricity is not an inevitable corollary of merit. Fidelity to
life is always the final and only trustworthy touchstone."
That's about as highfalutin as Conroy got. But in other words, being weird is an art,
according to Conroy.
I'm a big James Joyce head, so I don't necessarily agree with all of that there, but I really
admire this theory and how it was played out in Conroy's novels. He wrote two of them,
A World to Win and The Disinherited, and both are glimpses of a revolutionary possibility,
a part of literature that was snuffed out by the complications and abstractions of high
modernism and the New Criticism, which is what prevailed after the Second World War.
By 1940, everything in publishing and literature was shaken up by the war.
The poet William Carlos Williams wrote to his commie friend Lewis, worried that he was being shut out, possibly as retribution for his political friendships.
Williams wrote, They tell me it's due to a paper shortage.
While more paper is wasted for asinine purposes than there is piss in an army latrine.
That is a great William Carlos Williams impression.
I can hear like the plums in the icebox in that town.
Well, I knew I knew him.
I knew him.
Oh, sure.
Thousands of artists were blacklisted in Hollywood, which often gets the most attention in this period.
But the FBI showed up at everyone's office door in publishing, journalism, copy editing, book reviewing, etc.
Conroy lost control of his second created publication, and was divorced from the Anvil, which was then subsumed into the Partisan Review.
And then the Partisan Review became this sort of champion for high modernism and then would go on to receive CIA funding in the 50s and 60s.
Conroy wrote to a friend that the only safe thing to do is curse Moscow.
And if you do that, many of your past sins are shriven.
Shriven.
It's a great word.
There's a story from this time of a guy who gets caught by the police, and he's got a bunch of Anvil and Blast magazines, and he just tells the cops that he's a blacksmith and not a communist, and luckily the cops didn't read any of those things, so he got away with it.
Saved by illiteracy again!
University journals with steady funding, like the Kenyon Review, were founded around this time, in 1939, and became more important in the literary prestige economy than unaffiliated outlets like the New Masses or H.L.
Mencken's American Mercury.
It's easy to look back on this 1930s high point of American communism and proletarian literature and see failure, but this failure was very orchestrated.
As Taylor Dorrell notes in a piece on Mike Gold for JSTOR, "Gold was followed by agents who staked his whereabouts,
took note of his friends, family, and his work from 1922 until his death in 1967.
Indeed, to claim after World War II the proletarian culture was ineffective at combating fascism
or working towards socialism is ahistorical. While critics promote the idea that communists
were ineffective politically, the FBI had their hands full stifling the rise of Communist
Party USA and their influence on progressive politics."
The cultural programs of the New Deal were a life support system for many writers and artists who were blacklisted in this period.
Since Conroy's fiction was concerned with folk tales and poor people's history, he received a Guggenheim grant that helped him maintain research and writing for a period.
But official publishing routes were closed, and though Conroy had been named one of the most promising writers in the country in 1935, by 1940 he was a non-person.
So he did what any one of us would do, right fellas?
What would you guys do in the Red Scare?
I would sell Julian out in a moment!
Nice.
And I would sell drugs.
And I would be playing whatever popular video game was out at the time.
I think Cup and Ball, maybe?
Yeah, maybe Stick and Hoop.
First, get Cup and Ball.
I would be playing Stickball out in the street, completely ignoring the political upheaval.
Listening to 1940s Weezer.
Yeah, it would basically just be some sort of doo-wop.
Scanning lithographs for, like, ghosts?
Yeah.
That'd be cool.
Yeah.
I'd be unaffected.
Actually, you would be Jewish, and as such, not in a great place.
Yeah, yeah, I'd be out in the shtetl selling rags and old iron.
Working with my Bubby, working with my Bubby day by day.
We wheel our ice cart down the street.
We sell ice chips to the people as well as maybe some schmatties.
Some pickles.
Some pickles, some Bubby's pickles.
And every once in a while Charles Lindbergh just swoops down in his plane and starts firing away at everyone, you know?
Conroy moved back to St.
Louis and became a gang leader.
Okay, cool.
In the bars of East St.
Louis, some of the most disgusting and violent taverns in this country's history, Conroy essentially became the ringleader of a bunch of CIO toughs.
They were called the Fallonites, and they loved to get blackout drunk on grain alcohol and sing.
The CIO was the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the Fallonites were roughhousing factory workers who also had artistic pretensions.
They looked up to Jack, who had a literary career and had published books, and Jack continued to write these lewd plays about politics and class.
But otherwise, there was no one asking for a third novel.
No.
Plus, enough green alcohol and you just go blind.
It's hard to write.
Yeah, it's a real roll of the dice.
I do think the Fallonites should have their own movie, because they would put on like a Black Mass performance, which just seems very cool.
I don't know exactly what happened during it, but... Yeah, it was called Black Mass because they were all blacked out.
Yeah, Black Mass meaning zero memory.
Which is fitting because Conroy, I don't think, was very proud of this boozy period.
Meanwhile, McCarthyism continued into the 1940s, and Conroy moved to Chicago to be hired on to the Illinois WPA.
There, he worked closely with Harlem Renaissance poet Arnaud Bontemps on a study of Black migration since the Civil War.
One day, FBI agents knocked on the IWPA office door.
They had questions for Conroy and Bonhomme, specifically about the Nation of Islam.
They were searching for the truth about this man named Yacoub, a black scientist from 6,000 years ago, who created white people through a selective breeding process called grafting.
Just kidding.
I thought we were 3D printed.
We kind of were.
Yeah.
Instead, they were after something weirder.
The FBI interrogated Conroy and Bontemps about possible connections between the Japanese Black Dragon Society and the Nation of Islam.
Both authors denied any knowledge about any links between the two.
It's pretty cool to connect the Red Scare with the Yellow Peril and just plain old racism against black people.
Yeah, they were really cooking.
That's genuinely a blob.
That is the FBI brain blob.
It's fascinating how you can see just the little paranoid maps connecting, just like sending off little signals of like, what if Japan sides with African Americans and then what, you know?
Yeah, Japanese people famously not racist.
Right.
Why was the FBI after this?
To oversimplify it, the Nation of Islam in the 1940s was dangerous to the Jim Crow FBI because it was, essentially, a black liberation theory that influenced the Civil Rights Movement, and Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, and so on and so on.
The Black Dragon Society, meanwhile, was an ultra-nationalist movement in Japan and was said to control the government and seek world domination.
The FBI feared these two were in cahoots, but it's the Black Dragons that drove our plowboy poet completely insane and stands as an interesting case study in early Cold War paranoia.
In 1942, after three failed Guggenheim applications, H.H.
Lewis believed the Guggenheim decision-makers had it out for him.
Same here.
I see myself in him.
Absolutely.
He traveled to New York City armed with an enormous sheaf of poems, songs, ballads, free-verse narratives, and prose rhythms.
It was his last shot to convince the gatekeepers to support his cause, which was documenting the lives of the underprivileged in the Midwest.
Lewis would later conclude that the FBI, Communist Party, and the Black Dragons, or some combination of all three, were surveilling him on this NYC trip.
As Lewis wrote to Special Agent G.B.
Norris of the FBI office in St.
Louis, Behind all this, there is perhaps the most luridly unheard of spy thriller of the present war.
In New York, Lewis was received well by the leftists, but his temperament had burned bridges with guys like Mike Gold.
Lewis would write angry letters to people calling them dogs and shitheads, and they would write back calling Lewis a degenerate farmer who was just as stupid as everyone in his part of the country.
The theory of pro-lit was really falling apart here, and Lewis headed back to Cape Girardeau, back to the gumbo, where the madness really started to creep in.
As it does.
As it does.
Thanks to the beautiful librarians of Southeast Missouri State University, I got to read some of the letters Lewis wrote to Special Agent Norris at the FBI office in St.
Louis, and the stuff he was mailing to Congressman Orville Zimmerman of Missouri's 10th District.
I also read the letters that Lewis wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, and they are very hard to follow.
It was sort of like reading schizo Twitter in a really bad way.
But here's a summary of what Lewis thought was going on with the Black Dragons and the CPUSA.
In the Great Depression, there was a political rumbling around the Midwest because of this group called the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World.
This was a 1930s, pre-Pearl Harbor, pro-Japanese movement that promoted the idea that Japan was the champion protector of all non-white people.
The Pacific Movement theorized that Japan was going to invade the United States soon, possibly through the Midwest first, up the Mississippi River, because the invasion plan hinged on setting off a massive race war.
African Americans oppressed by Jim Crow were going to throw off their chains and murder their oppressors for the Japanese cause, which is a kind of fascinating study in Haitian revolution paranoia.
The Pacific Movement's practitioner and evangelist was a man named Dr. Ashima Takas, who claimed to be a member of the ultra-nationalist paramilitary the Black Dragon Society.
Dr. Takas became known in St.
Louis for organizing poor African-American communities using this anti-white sentiment, and he was pretty successful in collecting dues for his organization.
Dr. Takas used those dues to travel all over to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and New York, collecting pseudonyms for himself and membership fees along the way.
These fees would support Japanese soldiers and guarantee safety during the coming invasion, and maybe even provide a route to Japanese immigration after the fact.
The Pacific Movement was basically promising to end hegemonic white supremacy, and there was plenty of discontent to exploit on that front.
And honestly, it would have been an interesting historical turn.
Yeah, if it wasn't just like one grifter talking.
Yeah, it's, this is a great story of a con man, because Dr. Takis' real name was Policarpo Mananzala.
Okay, he was Italian?
Fuck.
Oh my god.
I assumed at least that much was true, but Jesus Christ.
Right.
He was Filipino.
Okay.
Oh, okay.
I have to say his name in like the Trump voice of like, Policarpo Manantala.
We don't like him, folks.
Folks, folks, we don't like him.
He's Japanese.
I like that he basically relied on Americans not being able to tell the difference between Filipinos and Japanese people.
Yeah, that's a very 1930s thing you could get away with, I think.
Mananzalo was Filipino, not Japanese, and you guessed it, he was a conman who skipped town on the Pacific Movement once everyone was on to his scheme, and then he became a traveling spice salesman.
He was eventually arrested for forging a money order in 1942, and this time he was posing as Mimo de Guzman.
Mimo de Guzman.
He's very nasty.
Watch out.
Mimo, the late, great Mimo de Guzman.
Mimo Guzman, a lot of people are talking, they're saying.
Maybe he's Japanese, but maybe he's not.
And a lot of other people are saying, Mumo is not such a great guy.
The black dragons?
The black dragons, they come for me in the middle of the night.
In the forms of shadows on my bathroom wall.
Black dragon, you smoke it out of a pipe.
Or so I've heard.
I don't do drugs.
I don't drink.
But I do drink dragons.
What am I even doing?
I do drink dragons.
You're really good at that, Jake.
Yeah, you're killing it, man.
Other than maybe, like, the content, but the tone.
No, the content is always bad.
That's what makes it funny, is that the content is bad.
He was indicted for embezzling funds from the Pacific Movement coffers.
Oh, so Trump would like him.
Exactly.
A lot in common, honestly.
What drove our beautiful gumbo poet Harold Lewis insane was a theory he concocted about Dr. Takas.
Lewis thought there was a fourth identity, and that Dr. Takas had posed as a fellow communist in the literary scene named Sesshio Oko.
Lewis and Oka were supposed to be friends and comrades.
In 1934, Oka had translated a glowing essay about Lewis's work entitled H.H.
Lewis, the American Satirist Poet.
But in 1942, Lewis came to believe that Oka was privy to information about Pearl Harbor before it happened.
Lewis believed that Oka had even written to him in code about Pearl Harbor as a warning, and Lewis concluded that Oka had secretly been Dr. Takas, and that the Black Dragons had infiltrated CPUSA.
Okay.
It happens.
Lewis is Takas.
Takas is Lewis.
Dr. Takas, where does his vaccine come from?
We don't know.
But rest assured, rest assured, I had something to do with it, folks.
I promise you.
Dr. Takas!
Okay.
We're gonna put you down.
Please, please do it.
The St.
Louis FBI office disagreed with this theory, and a letter Special Agent Whatever said, In other words, he's not that guy, he's this guy, and we got him.
Guzman. His whereabouts were known to this bureau, during which time he was under surveillance
by our agents.
In other words, he's not that guy, he's this guy, and we got him. Also, stop writing to
us because we're spying on you.
That's incredible.
I mean, this is a very specific type of madness where you're kind of agreeing partially with the agents that are tracking you and you have your own theory that's even more crazy than their theory.
And yeah, real mess here.
Yeah, this is like a white hat theory about Cold War FBI agents wanting to protect the socialist movement in America.
Yeah, exactly.
They were like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Hey, maybe you want to go back to your beautiful writing.
Yeah.
What about those poems, buddy?
You been working on those?
Drop this OCA shit.
To put it lightly, in 1942, Lewis showed a lot of signs of disorganized thinking.
He believed that Takis had pulled off this big dodge and that he had actually arranged a surgical change of face to pull off the deception.
My God.
Which is like, it's a 1930s version of face-off.
They take my face and they pull it off.
And this was a very public feud.
Oka's letters to Lewis express deep frustration at Lewis's accusations, as well as a plausible case for a misunderstanding.
Lewis's primary evidence against Oka seemed to be that a mutual friend, Pete Shaunt, probably got Oka's name mixed up with another Asian man in Chicago named Takano.
Lewis probably misheard Takano as Takas, and then we were off to the races.
And we can't forget about Michael Dukakis.
No, no, no, no, no.
A close relative.
No, that's completely unrelated, and we will be moving on.
Michael Dukakis.
My parents really liked him, but he didn't win.
And my younger brother and I, we thought that name was very funny.
Michael Dukakis.
We'd say to each other.
It's just great.
We've got Mimo, we've got Dr. Dukakis, we've got Michael Dukakis.
All of our friends are here.
Yeah, that's the big three.
Oko was a American Communist Party member who had fled fascist Japan and was cleared of suspicion.
It's probably not a coincidence that in 1942, around the same time as Lewis's crack up, the Black Dragons had appeared as villains in DC comic books, and they were like conspiratorial antagonists.
Oh boy.
Yikes.
Yeah, we got to watch out for the Marvel movies.
It's all deeply stupid Orientalism, and it's very fascinating.
At a larger level, Lewis was looking for clues as to what had happened to this once great force in American culture, which was going to manifest in Utopia, but it had been betrayed.
The spirit of Lenin was supposed to liberate the Missouri hinterland, and I will tell you from first-hand account, that did not happen.
In letters, Lewis begged the American Communist Party and the FBI to help him figure this thing out.
Boy, he almost pulled off the most unlikely partnership in history.
I like the idea of, like, Lenin's casket being driven around on a fan boat.
That'd be sick.
Conroy did not take Lewis's conspiracy seriously.
In a letter in 1945, he wrote, I doubt if the Communist Party of America will relish or credit your charges.
Not only that, but many of the FBI agents are still more zealous in hunting down Red than Axis agents.
There's almost sure to be a duplication of the Palmer raids after the war is over.
If you're on the list, you'll be one of the victims.
That's so cool that heading into World War II they were just chasing communists.
Yeah, nothing else was going on.
Nothing else on the docket.
Mm-hmm.
Nothing like that happening today, I'll tell you that.
That's right.
There's no lists.
Lewis even took extra measures to ensure his missives to Congressman Zimmerman and J. Edgar Hoover were specifically sealed so as to tell if someone was reading them, because Lewis believed someone was tampering with his mail.
Uh-huh, which is the very FBI he's writing to.
Exactly.
The FBI was opening Lewis's mail and had been for some time.
They had been following Lewis because he was a CPUSA member, and it's very funny to send a letter to the guy who's stalking you saying, hey, be careful about this mail.
Mm-hmm.
As the literary historian Douglas Wixon put it, "In a broader sense, Lewis's story reflects
events of greater consequence unfolding in a society when artists, writers, film directors,
and actors were intimidated, mentally tortured by agents and agencies of the government,
on evidence that no just court would admit." Douglas Wixon interviewed H.H.
Lewis just before his death in 1985.
The old rebel poet was living in a converted corn crib, which is a ventilated building used for storing ears of corn, and he was living there outside of Cape Girardeau, down in the bootheel.
Wixon described Lewis in his old age as a man of great personal dignity, erect bearing, and old-fashioned courtesy, but Lewis's mind never really recovered.
He confided in Wixon that some department of agents had welded an automobile to stilts outside of the corn crib window so that the car's headlights shone directly in upon him and his bed at night.
That's awesome, because there's so many easier ways to shine light into someone's window, but he's like, no, no, no, this is a car on stilts.
Yeah, it'd be a car on stilts.
It's weird that, like, the train gets supplanted by the car in this, like, paranoid fantasy, too.
That's appropriate.
Lewis showed Wixon a coffee-stained check for $1,500 from Yale University in exchange for some letters Lewis had received from Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson.
Our rebel poet left the archive proceeds uncashed, lying in a pile of newspapers, out of spite, maybe, but I choose to believe he had reached Leninist nirvana and did not care for worldly things, as Wixon theorized.
It is likely that the Japanese espionage plot that Lewis had fantasized was bound up with the question of literary recognition.
Lacking what he sought, Lewis felt abandoned and turned his disappointment to a paranoiac response directed at the FBI, who actually was harassing him, and alleged plots against the United States in World War II by the Black Dragons.
In his better days, Lewis had written anti-racist poetry and dreamed of Utterly as an American birthright, a community designed to create human thriving.
Lewis was the son of a boot-heel farmer, born into the kind of people who toiled in the gumbo all their lives.
And in socialism, Harold found a secular faith and the promise of a better tomorrow.
And that tomorrow was systematically cancelled, and it hurt him deeply.
After the Illinois Riders Project lost funding, Jack Conroy found employment with Nelson Algren in Chicago's Venereal Disease Control Unit, or SIF Patrol, as they called it.
Which was located in the Chicago Health Department.
I'm a dick inspector.
Absolutely.
Looking for the SIF.
As a WPA spinoff organization, the VD control sent Conroy as an investigator to taverns and suspected bordellos to deliver summonses.
He would escort prostitutes to health clinics for tests and, at least once, he was threatened by a pimp wielding a knife.
Okay, so more of a pussy inspector, I suppose.
He was more of a pussy inspector, for sure.
Got it.
I think that was on the resume.
This is notable because Conroy's fiction is remarkably intersectional before that is even a word that was invented by grad school.
For example, the illegality of abortion is a huge problem throughout A World to Win, which was published in 1935.
In that novel, doctors won't risk their license on someone who isn't rich enough to pay regular medical bills, and so one of our protagonists, Leo Hurley and his wife, are forced to flee the city and look for work.
They end up picking in a turnip field for $3 a day, and while there, a Mormon farmer won't allow Anna to work because she's pregnant.
Leo observes, "The Mexicans in the next field had their women and girls working with them,
but there appeared to be some difference between Mexicans and white men in the eyes of the Mormons."
It's the ultimate bind.
You're too poor for an abortion and too pregnant to work.
One day, a Mexican woman screams, running through the fields, calling for help.
She's had a miscarriage and lies in the ditch beside the road, weeping.
One of our white farmhands says to Leo, those people shouldn't be allowed to have children.
And Leo, sort of a stand-in for Conroy, says, shove it.
This pregnancy ends up killing Leo's wife, Anna, and he returns to St.
Louis at the end of Conroy's novel, Fully Jokerfied.
Leo ends up shooting a cop, and then goes to war with the America's first street fascists of the day.
It's very badass, and it's a very good novel.
In Chicago, after SIF Patrol, Conroy got a steady job editing encyclopedias, but still the FBI agents showed up again.
His employer turned the agents away, telling them, He's a good editor, and I don't care about his political ideas.
Like Lewis, Conroy retired to his hometown in Missouri.
His novels did not attract interest again until the late 1960s, after some of the Red Scare had receded and the counterculture began to investigate the amnesia.
In 1966, Arnaud Bontemps and Conroy together published their Illinois Writers Project study of migrating Black populations, which was reprinted as Any Place But Here.
In 1967, Gwendolyn Brooks presented Conroy with the first Times Prize, citing His aid and encouragement to young writers and his overall contributions to American literature, particularly his novel, The Disinherited.
There's a strong connection between the proletarian lit movement and the novelists of the mid-century who had come to typify American literature.
Who gets canonized is not the be-all end-all, but we might not have Richard Wright or Langston Hughes or Sherwood Anderson or William Carlos Williams without the proletarian literature movement.
I personally love A World to Win, but The Disinherited is Conroy's big seller.
It's also very good, and it's nearly out of print, which is a hint to the New York Review of Books that you should do, like, one of the nice little colorful editions of that.
That would be cool.
Please?
Please?
At the end of The Disinherited, our protagonist Larry Donovan has bore witness to years of economic immiseration in the Great Depression.
His family, his friends, and thousands of strangers have all been ground down by the system, forced to migrate, estranged from each other and their homes.
At the end of His Rope, Donovan finds work on a highway paving crew in the middle of farmland.
And while sweating under the hot Missouri sun, one day he watches a black man work himself to death.
The man keels over in the sun, and yet work has to continue.
Donovan challenges the water boy on why black and white workers have to use different cups, and the water boy accidentally drops leaves of chewing tobacco from his mouth into the water meant for his proud Nordic people.
In these conditions, Leo finally sees that fear binds capital exploitation together.
He has worked thousands of hours in embarrassing jobs that never pay enough.
He says, I no longer felt shame at being seen at such work as I would have once, and I knew that the only way for me to rise to something approximating the grandiose ambitions of my youth would be to rise with my class, with the disinherited.
Every guibe at any of the paving gang, every covert or open sneer by prosperous-looking bystanders infuriated me, but did not abash me.
The fat on my bones melted away under the glare of the burnished sun, and the fat in my mind dissolved too.
Yes.
Mmm, I like that description.
The fat in my mind.
Ozempic but for class consciousness.
I'm recommending it.
It just melts off.
After Donovan's epiphany, news from the city arrives.
Some 1,500 hungry people have marched on the St.
Louis mayor's office.
The disenfranchised are demanding to be fed, and the St.
Louis police have met them with tear gas bombs, but the workers stood their ground.
This event is called the July Riot and features both in The Disinherited and A World to Win.
The organizer tells Donovan that a black worker in St.
Louis was... Burned to the shoulder, but he kept catching the bombs and hurling them back at the police.
King.
This was crazy to me because in 2014, a St.
Louis resident named Edward Crawford was photographed throwing a flaming tear gas canister back at police during the Michael Brown protests.
Crawford reported that he had just come from work in a kitchen and was dressed in an American flag shirt.
In the photo, he is hurling a flaming, smoking grenade back at the militarized police in Ferguson.
The image became emblematic of justice-seeking defiance in the face of an overwhelming, antagonized police state.
It's a natural echo of the last century.
And while the 1932 July Riot is largely forgotten, it's been preserved in Conroy's art because his life was devoted to telling the stories of working people, up against all odds, hurling rocks at Goliath.
Conray took an interest in the weeds of human existence, the people of the abyss whose lives are rarely understood beyond the daily labor they perform in the background of bourgeois lives.
In 1985, Conray published his last work, The Weed King and Other Stories, and spent his final years offering wisdom to traveling scholars and readers who made the pilgrimage out to Missouri to visit the Sage of Moberly.
He won an honorary doctorate from the University of Missouri, and he won the Mark Twain Award from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.
Jack Conroy passed away and was buried in the Sugar Creek Graveyard alongside his brothers and his father in 1990.
As scholars like Douglas Wixon have pointed out, the Red Scare gave us all kinds of fucked up ideas about the origins of communism and socialism, including the notion that either of those political ideologies is particularly Russian or even foreign.
In fact, Wixon argues that Conroy's artistic political formations came from a thoroughly American tradition of protest, and it was expressed in earlier manifestations like the Farmers' Alliance, the People's Party, the Nonpartisan League, and especially the IWW.
There were various infusions of immigrant liberalism, such as the free-thinking 48ers that inspired Conroy and his Midwestern radical writers, and that created a genuinely distinct American proletarian cultural movement.
In his final published piece in 1985, these are the last words Conroy penned for print.
Where do the displaced from the computerized, demechanized plants of the new technology go?
Some may be found enjoying the hospitable soup lines of charitable organizations.
Others, homeless, sleeping on grates or in cubbyholes in the cities.
A boy or girl fortunate enough to afford four years of college may be fortunate to join the dance of the machine.
Different times, different customs.
The crucible of the future will turn out different workers.
But what sort?
And what temper?
Damn.
Yeah.
Beautiful stuff.
Yeah.
Amazing writing.
Thank you so much, Devin.
What an amazing story.
And of course, steeped in paranoia and rotted from the inside.
Poisoned.
It's coated in paranoia.
It's eerily relevant, maybe.
It's hard to connect, like, the lives of people in the 30s today, you know?
I like to think of all of our listeners lying in the gumbo with just their little eyes and nose and mouth poked out and they are looking up at the searing sun as they hear our words.
And H.H.
Lewis is muttering a dirty poem into their ear.
That's right.
About holding his pecker in his hand.
I have to say it's certainly no fun to hear about the struggles, you know, the struggles of people trying to fight or at least push back against, you know, this crushing sort of wealth gap and lack of It's just like, oh man, you would think in a hundred years that we would look like the, you know, the utopian meme, but that's not the case.
years later we're still, you know, we're still challenging these, you know, these
these same things. It's so, it's just like, oh man, you would think in a hundred
years that we would look like the, you know, you know, the utopian meme, but
that's not the case. That just, there are more voices, more voices and stronger law
enforcement agencies that are cracking down on anybody who believes that, you
know, the working class is essentially discarded by the American government.
Yeah, the Edward Crawford thing is like both inspiring and very depressing that it's like, oh, the same thing happened in 1935 or two.
Yeah.
But the struggle lives on in podcasting.
And of course, you can log on to your premier socialist resistance network at patreon.com slash QAA, where you could subscribe for five socialist bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week plus access to our entire archive.
I didn't stump, I didn't apologize at all.
In fact, I yelled at Julian for messing me up.
We really appreciate your support and that is how we can have Devin show up to a St.
Louis sound recording studio and read us his sultry words and apologize for any stumbles
he makes profusely as he sweats and sips from a small can of water lube.
I didn't stump, I didn't apologize at all.
In fact, I yelled at Julian for messing me up.
Yeah, it's actually Julian's fault.
And for every new subscriber after this episode, I will be adding one more shrimp to the gumbo pot.
Very nice.
That's good.
If you want to see me up to my ears in shrimp... Well, we'd like it to be crawdads, but you know, I suppose a Jewish boy from Chicago has to make do.
Yeah.
And isn't it shellfish?
That's a thing that Jewish people can eat.
There's no problem.
Yeah, we're not supposed to enjoy them, but that is one rule I choose not to follow.
That's right.
Devin, tell us where people can find more of your work and follow you.
I'm on the hot website x.com, as well as Instagram and TikTok.
And I'm working on a book about the veiled prophet.
And so you should tune in to hear news about that.
That's also a premium episode.
What are your handles on those platforms?
Oh, I'm Devin T. O'Shea on everything.
Awesome.
We'll put that link in the description, and we love you folks, and we appreciate you, and you can head to our website, QAAPodcast.com.
It'll soon be renovated.
I know right now it's still the old QAnon Anonymous stuff, but we will be updating it, and we may have a merch drop in the works with some of our new cover art on all kinds of fun mediums, so stay tuned, folks!
Listener, until next week, may Harold Hardwell Lewis bless you and keep you.
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Casey Jones was a son of a bitch.
Drove a steam engine through a forty foot ditch.
Pissed on the whistle and he shit on the bell.
And he went through Chicago like a bat out of hell.
Casey Jones mounted to his cabin.
Casey Jones had his pecker in his hand.
Casey Jones mounted to his cabin.
Bend over ladies, I'm a railroad man.
It happened one morning about a quarter to four Pulled up in front of a whorehouse door Climbed through the window with his cock in his hand Said I'll prove I'm a railroad man Casey Jones mounted to his cabin Casey Jones had his pecker in his hand Casey Jones mounted to his cabin Bend over ladies I'm a railroad man He lined a hundred whores up against the wall and he bet ten dollars he could fuck them all.
