Upcoming talk!

After a year of lockdown, and consequently few opportunities to have meetings and events, I am delighted to be able to announce an upcoming talk about Sylvia Pankhurst and her travels in America hosted by the lovely Socialist History Society on 15 April at 6.30pm. The event is of course online and you need to sign up in advance here. Attendance at the event will allow you to buy Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire and A Suffragette in America at a 30% discount.

Pedestals: Reflections on Sylvia Pankhurst, the Hermitage and the Politics of Historical Monuments

I stood looking at the empty plinth in the baking Baltimore sun. 'There is nothing in the world so invisible as a monument', Morgan and I had quoted Robert Musil's words to our students only a few weeks before in London as we looked at which slave owners, overseers of massacres and sworn enemies of democracy get away with being commemorated there.

The empty plinth, Baltimore, 2017 (all photos my own).

But there's nothing so visible as the vandalised statue or empty plinth. It reminds us that history is contested - quite literally from below. The Black Lives Matter movement protested at the presence of Confederate statues. Some were pulled down, vandalised. In Baltimore, however, the decision had been taken to remove them in the middle of the night. History would not be contested here - it would be swiftly rewritten.

Baltimore, 2017

History is written, we are told, by the victors. So how come there are statues to the Confederacy, the losing side in the American Civil War? 

The statues, though, don't date from the Civil War - they date from the era of Jim Crow and the KKK. These monuments weren't about the Civil War, they proclaimed the victory of white supremacy and terror.

This year, Black Lives Matter has proved as urgent a movement as ever and one that resonates across the globe. And in Britain the hated statue of Edward Colston, who made enormous profits from slavery in the eighteenth century, was torn down by a huge crowd and thrown in Bristol’s dock.

In light of these events, I offer these thoughts on my visit to The Hermitage as a historian undertaking research in the summer of 2018, following in the thoughts and footsteps of lifelong anti-racist Sylvia Pankhurst, as a small contribution to the discussion about the politics of historical monuments and present day injustice.

When I say ‘footsteps’, that’s not strictly true. On 14 February 1912, the day she arrived in Nashville, Tennessee, Sylvia Pankhurst was driven to The Hermitage – the former home of Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States. It is now, as in 1912, a tourist attraction.

The Hermitage, tourist attraction.

Morgan and I are not drivers (discussed in my Railroads post) and we naively thought we’d get to this tourist attraction by public transport. The bus was an underused service, there was only one other passenger and they didn’t appear to know where they were.

The Hermitage stop was nowhere near The Hermitage to which, it was now clear, there was no pedestrian access. We trudged alongside dirt tracks up a six lane motorway under the blaring sun.

Finally, seeing the signs to The Hermitage, we ran across that motorway. It was a ridiculous thing to do, but the whole situation was ridiculous.

We found ourselves at the beginning of a long, meandering road, the house nowhere in sight. And that’s because The Hermitage is a one thousand acre plantation. The picking of cotton by enslaved people on this huge piece of land was the source of Andrew Jackson’s wealth.

It would take you a very long time to get away from here on foot.

A railroad crossing on the plantation, which provides a sense of scale.

Sylvia Pankhurst was probably taken here by local suffragists; the Jackson home was first maintained as an attraction by women supporters. They were perhaps the same women who told Sylvia not to speak at Nashville’s Fisk University to an audience of black students, perhaps those that Sylvia remembered ‘talk glibly of the “slavery days” as they site behind the Negro coachman, or are waited on at table by the Negro women servants’ (p.156).

I had read Sylvia’s description of The Hermitage before I saw it for myself. It seemed little had changed. There was the ‘row of massive fluted columns of white stone along the front’(p.157).

The Hermitage, just as Pankhurst described it in 1912.

In the entrance hall our first guide, a white man in nineteenth century costume, painfully, offensively imitated the black woman housekeeper he imagined would have welcomed us during the ‘slavery days’.

He showed off the wallpaper depicting mythological scenes, especially ordered by the Jacksons from Paris. I could hear Sylvia whispering in my ear:

“The walls of the entrance hall are covered with a hideous hand-painted paper, specially procured from Paris in General Jackson’s time, which shows innumerable little six inch gods and goddesses passing through a series of meaningless adventures. It seems impossible that nineteenth century Paris could ever have produced anything more ugly.” (p.157)

It was all just as she had described, including the four post beds so far raised above the floor that beside them are ‘the steps by which the family were obliged to climb up to them at night’ (p.157).

These people even slept on pedestals. The house slaves, we were told, slept on the floor.

We followed Sylvia through the stuffy rooms to the back porch where, like her, we saw ‘still standing in a row, are the cabins in which the slaves were housed’ (p.158).

The slave huts at The Hermitage, also just as Pankhurst described in 1912.

This is in the home of the man The Hermitage unashamedly celebrates today as ‘The People’s President’.

The museum attached to the house insists that Jackson did ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – the overriding message being that we cannot allow the ‘bad’ to discount the ‘good’. It is a message that the President and CEO of The Hermitage reiterated in response to the Black Lives Matter movement this year: “Andrew Jackson was a complex man who, like many U.S. presidents, was far from perfect” (15 July 2020).

Or, as one commentator on a Hermitage museum film told us, we have all done good and bad things.

It’s easy to see how this argument is persuasive – because we have all done good and bad things. We can all relate to that. And who among us would agree that it’s fair that our worst misdemeanours should cancel out everything decent we’ve ever done?

But there’s a cunning sleight of hand going on here. This is not the same as finding out that a good president was a bit of a bully at school.

Jackson was a militarist and a populist, presenting himself as on the side of ‘the people’ against the elites – something uncritically repeated by The Hermitage today: “The People’s President”.

But which people? Not black people. Not those enlisted soldiers who mutinied against his leadership in the Creek War. And not Native American people.

Howard Zinn described Jackson as ‘the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history’ (Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2015, p.127). As president, he was responsible for the devastating forced removal of Native Americans.

Earlier in his career, in the war for territory occupied by the Creek Indians, Jackson expanded the American nation into parts of Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky and North Carolina.

His policy of selling off the land he seized expanded capitalist ownership and undermined the unity of Native American resistance. Huge tracts of seized land made way for new plantations tilled by enslaved black people to make huge profits for white plantation owners – like himself.

And this is why it is so clumsy to say that criticisms of the monuments to slave owners seek to erase history. Millions of people’s histories were forcibly erased and these monuments perpetuate the myths propagated by those who erased them. 

The Hermitage now purports to tell the stories of both the president and his slaves. But how can this claim upon balance be anything but one-sided when the president is the celebrated subject? It denies the fundamental antagonism in the relationship. Shouldn’t The Hermitage be a site of mourning, not celebration?

The Hermitage’s self-serving and simplistic ‘good’ and ‘bad’ dichotomy is misleading because it insists that they were separate. The ‘bad’ was not an aberration; it was integral to the creation of modern America. As the Black Lives Matter movement revealed, it’s not the past we are seeking to change, but the present.

 

 

Congratulations to Rachel Holmes on the publication of 'Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel'

"When she wrote her memoir of the suffragette movement, Sylvia Pankhurst explained:

My desire has been to introduce the actors in the drama as living beings; to show the striving, suffering, hugely hopeful human entity behind the pageantry, the rhetoric and the turbulence.[i]

Pankhurst’s vivid, detailed and human account, in scale and tone like a nineteenth-century novel filled with memorable characters and dramatic stories, became the defining history of that movement; the basis, for example, for the hugely influential 1970s TV series Shoulder to Shoulder that introduced a new generation to the suffragettes.

Rachel Holmes has achieved a similar feat in her monumental biography of Sylvia Pankhurst.  Where other biographies have focussed on a particular part of Pankhurst’s huge contribution to social movements in the twentieth century (Barbara Winslow’s Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism and Mary Davis’ Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics), or have written shorter accounts (Shirley Harrison’s Sylvia Pankhurst: A Crusading Life or my own Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire), Rachel Holmes’ book matches the scale, ambition and artistic spirit of her subject’s own writing. 

If Pankhurst had thought about what her biography should look like, I think perhaps she would have hoped for one like this."

You can read the rest of my rest of my review of Rachel Holmes' new biography of Sylvia Pankhurst on Counterfire.  Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel is out now and published by Bloomsbury.

---

[i] E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement (London: Virago Limited, 1977), Preface.

Great review in Labour/Le Travail

"The result is an extremely valuable and enlightening picture of Sylvia Pankhurst's changing political ideas, as well as revealing snapshots of the American women's movement and U.S. labouring and social life. Connelly's extended introduction provides an excellent picture of the context framing Sylvia's travel, including the variegated British and American suffrage movements that she interacted with."

Thanks to Professor Joan Sangster, in the Gender and Women's Studies department at Trent University, Canada, for this enthusiastic review of A Suffragette in America in Labour/Le Travail, the journal of Canadian Labour Studies. 

Two substantial extracts of the review are available here and here, the full text is available for those with login access to Project Muse or, even better, subscribe to the Labour/Le Travail and support a publication dedicated to working-class history.

Cover of the previous edition of Labour/Le Travail.

Labour History Podcast on Sylvia Pankhurst

I was delighted to join Paul T. Simpson to discuss Sylvia Pankhurst and why she remains relevant and inspirational today on his excellent Labour History Podcast. 

You can listen to the interview here.

Radical broadcasting!

New Short Documentary: 'Passionate Pankhursts' at the Smith Opera House, Geneva New York

Last year I took A Suffragette in America to the beautiful Smith Opera House in Geneva, New York State and was kindly given a guided tour of the Smith and Geneva's connections to suffrage history by Chris Woodworth. It was magical tour I'll never forget and now you too can share this experience in the 10th episode of Chris' documentary series 'Smith Opera House Ghost Light Tours: Passionate Pankhursts' available below.

You'll find out about why both Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst came to lecture at the Smith, the suffragists they met and the differences between the the politics of these two Pankhursts. You'll also find out about how it was easier for Sylvia Pankhurst to get to Geneva in 1911 than it was for me in 2019!

I wrote about the whole experience and discovering the history of suffrage and anti-slavery history in upstate New York in the 'Railroads' entry on this blog. I am really honoured that Chris has included parts of that entry and quoted from A Suffragette in America in her documentary.

Holding Sylvia Pankhurst's American book outside the Smith Opera House last year.
Photo: Chris Woodworth.

Solidarity greetings on May Day

Solidarity with everyone fighting for their lives at work today. Here's a piece I wrote for Counterfire on the history of May Day, an unfinished struggle.

Discusses many of the movements that inspired Sylvia Pankhurst - like the Chartists - and a number of the revolutionaries she admired, met and debated with including Eleanor Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.

Silent Agitator, by Ruth Ewan, The High Line, New York City, photo: Katherine Connelly

#PPENow #solidarityforever