Looking For Tecumseh’s Footprints

Tecumseh monument at Battle of Thames, Canada.

I live in the neighborhood of great events. You probably do too. Among life’s little joys for me is a trip to find those events in the landscape; a thermos of hot coffee, my camera, a serious stack of maps, reference books, choice tunes on the hifi and a meander through the city streets and rural lanes of southeast Michigan, and sometimes a whole lot further. Revolutionary road trips have long been my favored way to spend my own time.

Revolutionaries tends to take sides, and take sides historically as well. Leave ‘objectivity’ to the hegemons. A lot of what I look for are the things that appeal to the left-wing activist; sites of strikes, heroic last stands, scenes of eventful gatherings, graves of martyrs, old homes of radicals and the like. Signposts of resistance.

It’s not just the sites I’m looking for, but also the landscapes they sit in. Those landscapes have been shaped by this, relatively recent, class society like everything else. From the brick and mortar of the historic home, to the layout of cities, to the course of rivers and vegetation, so many products of the laws of capitalist accumulation. However, they were built onto a landscape already made. Where and when many of the villages and cities, roads and crossings of southeast Michigan were placed was entirely determined by prior actions of Indian peoples. Recently, I thought to look for something like the footsteps of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, who fought in the area as a leader in a Confederacy of Indian peoples.

A few weeks ago I decided to wind my way down from Ypsilanti to the mouth of the Huron River at Lake Erie. That river is one of those landscape features whose course has been altered by the expansion and needs of capital. A year-long obsession with the River’s, and region’s, late Indian history led me to try and follow, as close as possible, the river.

The river has gone through many changes, most noticeably through the use of dams and mill races from the earliest white settlement. In his desire to control all the sources of power around him, Henry Ford bought up a huge portion of the Huron River for its potential water power. To get to Lake Erie by way of the river requires one to  pass multiple dams and flooded zones (some of which buried the farming lands of the Potawatomi, the area’s last Indian inhabitants) until south of Belleville.

Relatively unaltered through miles of Metroparks, mostly reclaimed farmland, but some old industrial sites as well, the Huron flows past the old Wyandotte reservation north of Flat Rock. Perhaps I’ll write about that story in the future, it’s worthy of a post all its own.

I ended up skirting the river and driving through the collection of subdivisions and soon to be divided farmsteads and fields, four-way stops of gas stations and strips of parking lots with shops attached. It was about here that I decided to put on the new Swans CD and listen to the 30 minute cacophony on Toussaint Louverture; an escape more than a provocation.

The particular suburban landscape here isn’t really suburban at all (sub of what urban?), but the kind of hodge-podge you get when the deciding factor on location is which old farm is up for auction and where the closest on ramp to a major road is. Ugly doesn’t begin to describe it. Oppressive might.

That’s was not what I was looking for; my goal was Hull’s Trace, a historic road that lies under the current Jefferson Avenue for much of its length in this part of Michigan. Hull’s Trace was named after General William Hull, who, during the War of 1812, was placed in charge of relieving Detroit and securing a supply line through what was then largely held by Indians allied with Tecumseh’s Confederacy.

In a few short weeks in the summer of 1812, 200 US soldiers hacked their way from Urbana, Ohio to Fort Detroit in Michigan.

In this part of the continent, the period of the War of 1812, was really a continuation of the Northwest Indian wars of the 18^th century. Like the period of the Revolutionary War, when many Native Americans allied themselves with the British against the Colonies, who expressly proclaimed in their Declaration of Independence that among their reasons for revolt were the Crown’s refusal to allow them to take Indian lands deemed off-limits after the Indian rebellions of 1763 and that the Crown “has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages…”

Growing up in Ohio, Tecumseh was unavoidable for a young person fascinated with history and I have visited many of the places associated with him, including the Tecumseh Motel, a rundown place that sits on the on the site of his birth village. Last year, a comrade and I drove to Canada, just after the bicentennial anniversary, to visit the site of Tecumseh’s final stand. There he fell, along with many others including Roundhead, after yet another British betrayal at the Battle of the Thames in October, 1813. An affectingly desolate place in late fall.

Tecumseh’s forces were arrayed around Detroit and included warriors from a dozen nations, but to isolate Detroit they needed the support of the Wyandot villages along the Detroit River, and Hull’s Trace. Walk-in-the-Water, a head man in these villages, was convinced to join the Confederacy by Tecumseh and his leading Wyandot supporter, Roundhead.  Detroit was cut-off.

After a series of mostly successful battles by the Confederacy in the summer of 1812, US forces at Detroit surrendered to the combined Indian and British army on August 16. One needs to be reminded that, far from being rolled over, Native Americans won many spectacular victories, especially in the old Northwest, where two generations of resistance inflicted the greatest casualties on the US military by any Indian forces in history.

Detroit area, 1812

I wanted to find where the road and villages were, then take Jefferson up to Detroit following the route of Hull’s Trace. I had heard that a portion of the road, a corduroy section, had been exposed at the mouth of the Huron after the Great Lakes dropped a few feet in 2000. This area along the lake is mostly now protected parkland and small homes. The mouth of the Huron was long the home to various industries, but is now a place to put in for game fishing on Lake Erie.

For nearly two hundred years the road has been built upon, with a successive set of transportation technologies imprinting their needs on the route. But just a few feet under concrete and the semi trucks racing their hauls to warehouses and factories lay the very road walked upon by Tecumseh, Roundhead, Main Poc and the hundreds of others who united and fought to regain Indian lands lost across the Appalachians and retain an independent Indian polity in the face of American genocide and conquest.

When I found it, I ended up staying the whole afternoon until dusk, falling my way through the underbrush, soaking wet looking for anything and everything that might inform what I was seeing. For hundreds of yards rows of hewn logs (this area along the Lake was swampland and it was necessary to lay logs down for the carts and soldiers to travel) jutted from the side of the road bed into a channel of the Huron River.

The first thing I noticed was the size of some of the logs, clearly belonging to a very different forest than the one I was looking at. The parklands and reserves we take for granted as ‘natural’ would have been as alien in some ways as our cars and factories to peoples of two hundred years ago.

Wood demands touch, especially worked wood, and I felt many of the logs as I hopped from dry spot to dry spot, sometimes successfully. Impossible not to think of the shoes that trod those logs, the armies that crossed them, the wares and ideas, messages and something like hope that Indian peoples brought with them that summer on this very wood, felled from the forest that some knew so intimately.

Facing east there is no good sunset over this part of Lake Erie, just across from the remains of the road. But I ended up there on a cloudy and unremarkable dusk. A historic marker sits in a parking lot at the mouth and gives some information on the road. None of it captured what that road meant, for a moment in the summer of 1812, in the strategy, and hope, of the last collective Indian military resistance in the region.

The defeat of which, the following year, would mean removal and the opening of the land to speculators and a flood of American settlers, and eventually the landscape we live in today, including the nearby Woodland Beach subdivision, which is neither.

The struggle for Indian self-determination is hardly over, and despite all, the genocide ultimately failed. However, the independent Indian world that Tecumseh and the people who won this road sought to defend is no more.

Took the long way home, back roads all the way and listened to the baseball game, wishing I could travel back in time with a knapsack full of ordinance strong enough to make a difference. Some folks place their hopes in imagined futures; I certainly have mine. But I place all of my fiercest wishes in imagined pasts.

The Story Behind a 1920 Communist’s Speech in Ann Arbor

April, 19, 1920. Ypsilanti Daily Press.

Marxism in Washtenaw County, just west of Detroit, was little more than a novelty before the First World War. Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labour Party had some supporters, but very little organization. Unions, including the likes of the Knights of Labor, had a long history in the area, but their presence was sporadic. Many of the industrial mills that lined the Huron River were unionized, or at least unionization was attempted, in the 1880s and 1890s. Hundreds of women worked these mills and Ypsilanti’s “factory girls” certainly made their voices heard in those early years.

The Socialist Party was large and organized enough to field slates of candidates at all levels of government in many parts of the state, but not rooted in the working class enough to get many votes. Crucially, Debs was not on the Michigan ballot in a number of elections.

Dennis E. Batt

After the cataclysm of the World War and The Russian and other revolutions, many more workers looked to the possibilities of radical transformation as offered by the Bolshevik experience as a new possibility.

The article above, from April, 1920, details a talk given by then Proletarian Party leader, Dennis E. Batt at the Ann Arbor Labor Temple, once at 306 S Main, now a high-end art gallery. Batt was a pioneering American Communist and among the most important early Communists in Michigan.

He spoke on the topic of ‘Marxian Socialism’, which Batt vulgarly describes as essentially; the class struggle, materialist conception of history (which seems something quite different to me from Marx’s ‘historical materialism’) and law of value (labor theory of value). For another speech giving his views during this period see this talk given at Madison Square Garden.

Dennis E. Batt was born in 1886 in Tekonsha, Michigan, the son of a street car conductor and later moved to Detroit before joining the military while still in his teens. After returning from the service, Batt became a tool and die maker in a factory, a trade he would continue throughout his life, and joined the Socialist Party of Michigan where he became an acolyte of John Keracher and the ‘impossibilist’ wing of the Party.

The Michigan Socialist Party, a hotbed of radicals after the war, was expelled by the National SP, like many other Party locals, in 1919. Fights over ‘reform or revolution’ and organizational practices ignited by the Bolshevik Revolution would split the Socialist Party all across the country. A contemporary report of the meeting in which the left-wing under Keracher won the Michigan Party can be found here.

Batt, along with Kerarcher and the bulk of the Michigan SP, had taken strong anti-reform positions; positions which would be considered crazy, ultra-left stuff today.  But hey, the Hapsburgs, Romanovs and Hohenzollern dynasties had all fallen in the previous eighteen months and the red flag had been hoisted over a half-dozen European capitals, so they had reason to be optimistic about the course of revolution. And, of course, the War had finished them for reform.

October 3, 1919. NY Times.

September 1919 saw the Communist Party of America, supported by Batt and other radicals associated with the foreign language sections of the SP, and the Communist Labor Party of America, supported by John Reed with an orientation to the IWW.

Batt was named National Secretary of new Communist Party of America and edited The Communist, weekly organ of the Party. At the Chicago of the founding meeting of the CPA, federal officers arrested Batt for sedition on the floor of the meeting.

CPA organ, edited by Dennis Batt.

Batt and others in Michigan rejected going ‘underground’ in response to the Palmer Raids of the CPA and split to form the Proletarian Party of America, with Batt as National Secretary and editor of The Proletarian. He went to Moscow for the Red International of Labor Unions convention in 1921 and attended the 3^rd Congress of the Comintern in the failed hope of getting the new PP recognized as a section.

The Proletarian, edited by Dennis Batt.

Later, Batt would be elected to the Executive of the Detroit Federation of Labor and President of Lodge 82 of the Machinists. He also became editor of the DFL’s organ, Detroit Labor News.

Eventually Batt’s position in the unions brought him into conflict with his  comrades in the Proletarian Party and he was expelled in the late 20s, thereafter becoming an increasingly traditional union bureaucrat who, like so many who would gain similar positions, severed his ties to radical politics.

John Keracher (1880–1958)

The Proletarian Party would soldier on as a Detroit, and later Chicago, based radical party for decades, with areas and occasions of real importance.  Declining by the late 1940s and finally disbanding in 1971, John Kerarcher would serve as leader of the Proletarian Party from 1920 until ill-health forced him to step down in 1954.

During the 1990s Detroit newspaper strike, I had the good fortune and great pleasure of getting to know an old stalwart of the Party, Fred Valle, a barber by trade. We marched together, him in his late 80s or early 90s, with another aged veteran, the SWPs Frank Lovell, at the 1997 Action Mowtown demonstration.  What a pleasure it was to hear these two men reminisce and even engage in friendly redebates of  old contentions on the same streets they did so in the past. I asked questions and soaked it in as we walked in the last great Detroit labor struggle.

Batt was a forerunner, with many of the same strengths and weaknesses, of what became the post-Russian Russian Communist left; the official and the critical. That the offical labor body in Ann Arbor gave Batt their hall to talk to them about Marxism in the midst of the Red Scare says something about his standing in the movement at the time.

Batt’s radicalism was shaped by the great strikes of the 1870s, which would define the world of labor he was born into. Later, as a young man, the intense class war of the first two decades of the twentieth century would seem him actively participate. All of those experiences would be redefned by the events of the World War and the Russian Revolution.

Unions in the area would increase throughout the 1920s, though the campaigns were much more muted and the politics more conservative than those before the war. It was in this period that Batt “sold out”. The Communist Party would only really begin to have influence in Michigan through the rise of the CIO and the UAW in the 1930s, with its multiple crises. Batt would be a bitter rival and object of derision by these new unionists and his former comrades, so much like the Batt of twenty years before.

Communist Party rally in Detroit, 1937.

Even in Washtenaw County, the massive Willow Run Ford factory in Ypsilanti had several separate Communist or radical inspired caucuses in UAW Local 50, including many black auto workers. During World War Two and the era of the Popular Front, the city’s large and energetic Young Communist League was led by a black man, Thomas Dennis. Like Batt, Dennis was also be a union and political leader, but with deep family roots in the freedom struggles of the 19th century.

Also like Batt, he would be arrested for sedition, under the Smith Act, after another World War, but that is for another post.

In Photos: Detroit Protests the Israeli Invasion of Gaza

An afternoon demonstration on July 18, 2014 following the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip. Dearborn City Hall, Michigan Avenue.

 

A sabbatical?

Readers of Rustbelt Radical will be aware that there hasn’t been anything to read for over a year.

My last year in graduate school and an intensive final project took all of my time, and my energy. A huge amount of primary research and even more effort assembling and presenting it. It explores in-depth the history of a black Michigan community from the decades from before the Civil War up to the Great Migration.

It was a lot of work and passionately consuming and will be a project I will continue with. I am proud of it and will undoubtedly be incorporating what I have learned into coming posts. I hope that I still have my voice and that older readers will return as I work my way back into semi-regular writing, which I have dearly missed. Thanks for hanging in there with me comrades; I’m also trying out a new look for the site.

Now let us turn our faces to the enemy; they have been busy.

Rustbelt

Detroit and the end of the Second Reconstruction

A racist assault on Reconstruction’s Freedmens Bureau. Same arguments peddled about social services, Detroit and other black cities today.

Detroit sits on 20% of the world’s fresh water and has the third largest water supply system in the country, and yet thousands of its people, and the numbers are growing, are being denied access to clean water. If that’s not a damning indictment of the capitalist model, than I don’t know what is.

This water, owned by the citizens of Detroit, provides over 4 million people, largely in the suburbs, with water. You would think it would be considered a huge asset of the city in its renewal. Investing large amounts to find and deal with the many redundant lines, services belonging to abandoned buildings, and other upgrades in order to restore some efficiency so that the city can continue to profit long-term from this unique resource?

Why not do what some places do that, by virtue of living in on the site of a valuable resource, like Norway’s oil, share that wealth in subsidies (or even ‘free’ utilities) and investments in social services for residents?

No, instead it will be chopped up, deunionized, downsized, privatized, speculated upon and thrown like carrion to the vultures.

The current world of capital will not allow for such a resource to stay outside of the market. What it will allow for is a massive state intervention to move public property into private hands and without any compensation. Imagine the howls about ‘freedom’ from these same privateers if the state forcefully took their ill-begotten gains and transferred them to the public commonwealth.

New Detroit chooses to increase rates 9% on rates that are already twice the national average on the people least able to pay ($75 a month when you live on less than $1000 is simply a hardship). And then, turn off the spigot on the poorest and most vulnerable; those behind for the measly amount of $150, or as also happened in many cases—those in good standing.

All the while water runs in the street from innumerable breaks, continues to flow to countless abandoned structures and businesses that owe 100s of thousands in debt to the Water Department aren’t touched.  The golf clubs necessary to host all of the privatization deals being discussed still get theirs, $400,000 of debt to the Water Department notwithstanding.

But what’s not necessary to those deals are all the black, and mostly poor, people who make up eighty-something percent of the Detroit’s population. More than unnecessary, they are an impediment to land values and real estate speculation and must be removed. Then the real ‘development’ can commence.

Remember when we learned about the end of Reconstruction, the introduction of share cropping, the end of black elected officials and the rise of Jim Crow? The promises of the Civil War and Reconstruction betrayed and abandoned?  Well, I think we are looking at something analogous here now.

In the period after the Civil Rights movement a degree of black political power was won and exercised, a first since Reconstruction; this time, instead of in the local and state governments of the defeated South, it was in the mainly large, northern industrial, urban centers, backed up by municipal and other unions, that black folks held a modicum of autonomy and social power.

With the disenfranchisement of a majority of Michigan’s black citizens, privatization of city services and schools, the ‘Right to Work’ enactments and the end of manufacturing and with it, hope at bettering your position through work, we can add what amounts to forced removal of unwanted population from those cities, so that the land might be more profitably exploited.

Black people have been systematically stripped of the gains made in the previous struggle. As well, the social positions from which to defend those gains, like unions and municipal controls, have been decimated.

The era of Civil Rights is long over. In many ways, it has been defeated. It is the end of the Second Reconstruction we are living through now; in our cities, before our eyes. This time in the era of neo-liberalism, and of the first black President.

Here is an essential talk from Glen Ford from this week giving some background and context on this process. Racialized capitalism as agent of renewal is a disaster for black, brown and poor people.