Sender Garlin

Template:TOCnestleft Sender Garlin...was a Boulder Colorado activist.

Background

According to Howard Zinn;

As the twentieth century came to an end last December, an extraordinary man, whose life spanned the century, died at the age of ninety-seven. His name was Sender Garlin.

I first met Sender, ten years before his death, when he was only eighty-seven years old. It was the fall of 1989, and I had traveled to Boulder to give a talk at the University of Colorado. One of the chief organizers of my stay was a man named Sender Garlin, a longtime radical journalist and pamphleteer. I did not know him, and so I was not prepared for the excitement of my encounter with him.

We met for lunch at the faculty dining room. I assumed this would take an hour, but it lasted for two hours and could have gone on for six, so animated was the conversation, so high the energy, so full of questions was I, so full of thehistory of this century was Sender Garlin. He kept saying: "It’s my turn to question you. Equal time, you know." But I knew we were not equals in what we had to say.

I am a historian, and Sender, born in 1903, had lived through some of the most exciting historical moments of our time. He had covered the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s for three leftwing newspapers, the only Western correspondent to be present at all those bizarre proceedings, in which Stalin methodically disposed of his former fellow revolutionaries. In this country, he reported on a different kind of lynching, the trial of the "Scottsboro Boys," nine black youths falsely accused of rape in Alabama during the Depression years and sentenced to death.

Garlin grew up in a working class environment in Vermont and upstate New York, his father a baker who, according to Sender, was "an equal opportunity employer," enlisting the services "of my mother and my three older brothers." He studied with Scott Nearing and other blacklisted academics at the Rand School of Social Science and spent several years in college and law school. He had no degrees, but his education in the world was first class. He found college libraries more enlightening than classroom exercises .

Reading The Appeal to Reason and the writings of Upton Sinclair, Sender at thirteen or fourteen considered himself a socialist. He said: "In later years, it was Karl Marx who recreated me with his criticism of this cruel, unjust society. . .No one has refuted his fundamental critique."

Covering the bitter labor struggles of the twenties and thirties (the textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, the turbulent strikes in California as editor of the Western Worker), he was deeply affected. Sender Garlin could never be the detached professional journalist, above the battle, any more than John Reed covering the Paterson mill strike of 1913, or Theodore Dreiser, writing about the mine struggles in Kentucky.

As a reporter, he interviewed such diverse figures as Clarence Darrow, Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Huey Long, Lenin’s widow Krupskaya, and Olga Kniper-Chekhova, the Moscow theater star and widow of the great Russian writer.

Sender helped form the John Reed Club in the early 1930s and was a founding editor of Partisan Review before he moved on to write for The Masses.

He spent time as reporter for the Bronx Home News, which insisted on a "local angle" in every story, so when Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, its headline read: "Lindbergh flies over the Bronx on the way to Paris."

But [Sender Garlin]’s main thrust and satirical barbs were always against the system: the exploitation, the racism, the militaristic nationalism that have plaguedthis century, whether in the extreme form of Fascism or in more disguised form.

Aftermoving to Boulder in 1980 with his wife, the poet Martha Millet Garlin, he immediately became involved with political activities in the area. He worked energetically with CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) to protest the Reagan Administration’s policy of sending arms to the death squads there. A colleague of his in CISPES, Gonzalo Santos, hearing of Sender’s death, wrote: "I will miss Sender. He was the greatest role model of an organizer of, and fighter for, the people that I have ever encountered..."

Sacco and Vanzetti

Dorothy Parker's attraction to political activism can be traced to two events. In August 1927, Parker and other Algonquinites marched in Boston to protest the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian Americans who were arrested, convicted, and executed for robbery and murder. Protests during the seven years of litigation focused on their ignorance of American ways and their avowed anarchism, which may have prevented a fair trial. Sacco was accused of the killing, and Vanzetti was tried as his accomplice.

On the day of the execution, Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay went to Boston to plead a stay of execution from the governor. Other sympathetic groups marched with placards outside the statehouse where the governor's council was meeting. It is thought that most of the marchers were members of the Communist Party, including Michael Gold, editor of New Masses, and Sender Garlin of the Daily Worker. It is believed that this was Parker's first direct contact with members of the Communist Party.

The police arrived and arrested many of the marchers, including Parker and John Dos Passos. She was fined five dollars for loitering and later told reporters that she had been "treated roughly" by police. After a reprieve, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on August 3. .

Salute to Sender Garlin

In May 1992 The Communist Party USA newspaper Peoples Weekly World published a May Day supplement. Included was a page of greetings to Sender Garlin, sending greetings for his 90th Birthday. Most of the endorsers listed, were identified members or supporters of the Communist Party USA..

References

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