International Women’s Day this Saturday March 8 will give women, their allies, and others targeted for harm by the out of control attack on civilized values and Constitutional norms by the current maladministration to make their voices unequivocally clear. This year the official Women’s March, which has organized national protests since the giant march in 2017 against Trump’s first inauguration and has inspired sister marches across the globe, concentrated on the broader People’s March this year on January 18. Local People’s March events were also held on March 1. 

 

This year the Women’s March and other organizations are promoting Women’s Day marches and rallies across the country. See here to find local events. Chicago hosts a major regional event this Saturday beginning at 11:30 am at Dailey Plaza with a march to Trump Tower setting off an hour later. Their call says: 

 

This International Women’s Day, we’re hitting the streets with Women’s March to show our collective power. Women’s March is built, funded, and led by everyday women—just like us. No matter the administration, we choose solidarity, safety, and each other. Now more than ever, we must take action for a feminist future where all women, femmes, and gender-expansive people are safe, valued, and free. Join Gemmes for Femmes as we march, rally, and raise our voices for justice, equity, and liberation. 

 

For us in the far Northwest boonies of Chicago, a rally along Rt. 14 in Crystal Lake centered at Exchange Drive from 11 am to 1 pm will be the first time since the inauguration we will have a chance for a large, local display of resistance. Sponsor McHenry County NOW invites all to join them in an intersessional display of defiance. 

United We Resist!

 

On International Women’s Day Saturday March 8th from 11am-1pm, it seems fitting that we’re taking to the streets with our friends & neighbors who care about the constant attacks on the Rights of Women, People of Color, the LGBTQIA+ community, Veterans, those with Disabilities, Low income families, Seniors, Farmers & our Migrant/Refugee families in this country.

Now is the time we stand up in the name of humanity and refuse to accept our rights and freedoms in this country being stripped away every day.

Now is the time to hold our elected officials who support fascism accountable, and to expect our elected officials who support democracy to show up and fight for it alongside us! When we look back at this timeline in history, let's look back confident that we resisted, we refused to be silent, and we refused to look the other day while our Democracy was being destroyed before our very eyes!

         Together, neighbor beside neighbor, we will fight fascism! 

         Sign up here.

 

Ash Wednesday Calendar Coincidences Inspired Murfin Verse

Catholic school students at a compulsory Ash Wednesday service.

Regular readers know that silly calendar coincidences trigger compulsive versification in me the way a strobe light sets off an epileptic seizure.  It ain’t pretty to look at and witnesses are embarrassed for the victim but can not tear their eyes from the spectacle. 

Last year it was the quite contradictory urges of Valentine’s Day, fixed on February 14 way back in 496 CE when Pope Gelasius I was regularizing the calendar of feast days.  He assigned the date to a legendary early Christian Saint of whom literally nothing was known. Ash Wednesday, the floating observance of the first day of Lent and the second most solemn day of the year after Good Friday. 

One observation celebrates romantic love with all of the urges and excess that implies while the other calls for penance, fasting, and a solemn rejection of the temptations of the flesh that might detract attention from the coming sacrifice of Christ.

A guy could get whiplash trying to cover both bases in 24 short hours.

Valentine’s Day/Ash Wednesday
February 14, 2024

The convergence of Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday last happened in 2018. It happens again in 2029, but usually it’s rarer than that. It won’t occur again in this century.

Mark the day for failed love—
    abandonment, betrayal, cruelty,
    abuse, brokenness, contempt.
Wear scarlet, sack cloth optional
    dine alone.
Give up dreams
    for the season.

—Patrick Murfin

                                                Cupid, the Roman God of erotic love, son of Venus and Mars, lover of Psyche.

I had a different take on the subject the previous time it happened just in 2018.

Valentine’s Day/Ash Wednesday
February 14, 2018

Doth the thumb smear on Cupid’s brow,
dour penance and virtuous sacrifice
    subdue ard/or or blunt the arrows
    from his quiver?
Or doth affection triumph after all,
    lust work its wanton magic, pagan heart
    smother sanctimony?

—Patrick Murfin

George Washington supposedly took communion with his aides and officers at an outdoor service  held by the Morristown Presbyterian Church which claims that he officially joined during the period when the Continental Army was headquartered there.  The claim is boosted on right wing web sites trying to prove that Washington was a fervent evangelical Christian.  But there is no evidence that Washington actually took the communion wafer or that he ever joined the congregation.

Before either of those occasions Ash Wednesday bumped right into George Washington’s Birthday in 2012.

The Vestryman
Ash Wednesday/Washington’s Birthday 2012

The Vestryman performing the duty expected of the local Squire
                attended chapel when absolutely necessary
            and when no good excuse like fighting an Empire
            or Fathering a Country was handy.

He sat bolt upright on a rigid pew
                    contemplated the charms of Lady Fairfax
                            or later dental misery.

            When came the Altar Call, he would stand up,
                        turn on his heel, and march straight out
                        as if a legion was at his back.

            No filthy priestly thumb ever grimed
                        that noble brow.

—Patrick Murfin      

 

 

Tossed Like Beads—Mardi Gras with Murfin Verse

Note—It’s a busy time on major religion calendars.  As Muslims observe the month of Ramadan with fasting, prayer, and purification, Western Christians will begin their own period of  austerity  preparation on Ash Wednesday, March 5.  That means a final party—a carnival—is celebrated on Fat Tuesday, Mardis Gras.  And so we have a two-fer—the second entry for today. 

Revelers are crowding the French Quarter again in New Orleans 

There are a downsides to having been raised vaguely Protestant and residing in sometimes inhospitable northern climes.  Perhaps the biggest is regarding with wistful envy the liberating extravagance of Carnival and Mardi Gras.  It is the un-religious holiday—a day of wallowing in the ways of the flesh and merry making before getting down to the serious and unpleasant tasks of the proper piety of Lent.

Catholics seem to know how to take advantage of the opportunity, especially in warm places where the streets beckon—New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro most famously.  But folks from countries where Romance languages are spoken can find ways to celebrate even in icy Quebec City.  

It's Mardis Gras in warm places.

The idea is simple.  Finnish up the Christmas season on the Feast of the Epiphany, the fixed day of January 11, and then coast down the hill of Ordinary Time until Ash Wednesday kicks off of Lent, which by the lunar calendar falls anywhere from February to March, gathering speed all the while.

It is the “dead of winter.”  Even in Mediterranean countries it was dark and often cold.  Folks stayed inside more, got on each others’ nerves.  But by Fat Tuesday, the sap was running and Spring seemed just over the horizon.  Perfect for one last opportunity to bust loose before breaking out the sack cloth and ashes.

Protestants, particularly Calvinists, their decedents, and those who stood close enough by to be infected, took a dim view of the whole process.  More Papist/pagan nonsense to them.  A good Calvinist existed in a state of perpetual Lent.  The experience of any sensual pleasure was regarded as a sinful distraction from contemplation of the awesome majesty of God and our totally undeserving souls.  It was for good reason that Puritanism has been described as the nagging suspicion that somewhere, somehow, somebody is having a good time.

  

Cute.  But English alter boys flipping pancakes is a poor substitute of sex, sin, and degradation

England, I am told, once celebrated Carnival—a cultural gift of the Norman French aristocracy.  Cromwell and his boys pretty much wiped that out at the point of the sword.  Even when Kings remounted the Throne and the Anglican Church regained the upper hand, the old traditions fell away.  They shrank the celebration down to something called Shrove Tuesday, which is celebrated mostly by making and eating pancakes.  Now I bow to no man in my affection for the flapjack or griddle cake, but even a high pile drenched in butter and real maple syrup is a poor substitute for dancing semi-naked in the streets.  Brits passed this tradition on to all the former pink spots on the globe where the Empire once ruled and to all the Protestant sects derived from Anglicanism and Calvinism.

Of course, not all Catholics party with absolute abandon.  Those from northern and eastern Europe either never celebrated or toned down Carnival.  The Poles celebrate with Pączki Day (pronounced pŭtch-kē).  In the old country it was held on the Thursday before Ash Wednesday, but in the immigrant communities of North America it is held on Fat Tuesday.  Folks line up at bakeries at the crack of dawn to purchase pączkis, a kind of jelly doughnut made only once a year.  This is a much bigger deal than it sounds on Chicago’s Milwaukee Ave, the main street of the Windy City’s Polonia.

Near riots have been known to break out at certain celebrated Chicago bakeries.  Purists denounce the faux Pacziki sold in boxes at supermarkets starting weeks before Fat Tuesday--pretty much ordinary jelly donuts with plenty of preservatives.  Only fresh bakery ones served by a grandmotherly lady in a hairnet with a thick accent are acceptable. 

In Germany, the Baltic states, and Scandinavian Fat Tuesday is likewise celebrated with special local pastries meant to use up the supply of sugar and lard before the Lenten fast.

Tonight night the biggest and most honored Krews will be conducting their parades in New Orleans. 

Down there, they take Mardi Gras seriously and have stretched it to the whole season between the Epiphany and Lent.  Various parades have been winding down the streets of different neighborhoods for weeks, each followed by its own Ball.  The streets of the French Quarter will be crowded this evening.  Many revelers, as always, are drunken northerners and Calvinist escapees.  They will party next to the locals, drinking copiously, begging for beads cast from the parade floats, and eying the pretty young girls flashing their tits.

 Everyone will forget sturm und drang, dread, and chaos of this new year.  Even a good many MAGA loyalists, Christian nationalist acolytes, and the rest of that tribe will be at the big party in the Big Easy hoping that TV cameras do not broadcast their participation back home.

Kill joy Donald Trump will make his first address to the Joint Houses of Congress for his second term tonight.  Mardi Gras partiers will miss it.  Given the grim circumstances of the world, it will be a buzz kill for those at home trying to celebrate vicariously.  Drinking games like downing shots for every lie or incoherent rant could rival the consumption of the heartiest revelers on Bourbon Street.  I will dutifully tune in, but I will wish I was with them in New Orleans.  It’s been far too long since the Old Man reveled in sin and degradation. 

Eleven years ago, Social Justice Committee of the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry was scheduled to dutifully meet to do its earnest work on the evening of Fat Tuesday.   We were, after all, the stepchildren of those old Massachusetts Puritans.  As Chair it was customary for me to open the proceedings with a reflection.  Usually, it was a reading I snatched from the internet.  But that bitterly cold night smack dab in the Winter that would not end with howling winds blowing snow dangerously across the roads, we gathered anyway. I read them this.  Fitting and apt.   Sitting through my poetry ought to be hair shirt enough for any Puritan.

 

                                                 The radical equality of Samba dancers in Carnival in Rio.

A Prayer for a Committee Meeting on Mardi Gras
March 4, 2014

        Drudges like us throw on our heavy coats
                and slog through the still arctic night
                to rendezvous around a table
                for the earnest business of making the world
                a kinder place
                or so we tell ourselves.

        We pass the hours elbow deep
                in the common dishwater
                of routine and rote,
               duty and debate
               and adjourn the world not moved
               a centimeter from its calamitous orbit.

        But tonight in the Big Easy,
              down in Rio or far off Nice,
                    any of the warm places
                    where the evening pulses expectantly,
            they don masks and dance heedless
            in the streets.

        In timeless Carnival
             the rich and poor,
                 Black and White,
                    queer and straight
                        alien and citizen
            revel together in absolute equality.

        In the common streets
             justice rolls down like bons temps
             and righteousness,
             the enemy of comity,
             is tucked away in a samba dancer’s thong.

        For this one night there is Joy
             and the old world dances to a coronet.

        —Patrick Murfin

Celebrating Ramadan in Verse

Note—I missed the beginning of Ramadan in this part of the world last Friday, February 28.  I blame my old style wall calendar hanging by my desk where your low tech scribe keeps track of such things.  But the Holy month continues.

 In most of the Islamic world Ramadan the ninth month of the Muslim Calendar, began last Friday at sun down. The date is calculated by the first sighting of the crescent after the New Moon.  Since this can vary in different parts of the world, so can the marked beginning of the month.  In the United States the western calendar date was February 28.

Observation of the rising of the crescent new moon marking the start of the month officially begins Ramadan.

Ramadan was the month in which the first verses of the Qur’an were revealed to the Prophet Mohammad. 

The month of cleansing as the faithful rededicate themselves to Allah by emphasizing patience, humility, and spirituality by an absolute fast observed by all Muslims over the age of puberty each day between dawn and dusk.  The observant are also called to be more reverent and fervent in prayer.  During Ramadan the entire Qur’an is often read in mosques in 30 installments.

Customs connected to the Ramadan observance vary somewhat culturally and between Sunni and Shi’a traditions.  In more secular Islamic countries evenings after the fast are often filled with feasting and entertainment, while attendance to evening services following a modest breaking of the fast is customary in more traditional societies.  Acts of charity to the poor are encouraged. 

British Muslims share an Iftar meal breaking the fast of Ramadan after sunset.

The holiday of Eid-al-Fitr marks the end of the fasting period of Ramadan and the first day of the following month, after another new moon has been sighted, 29 or 30 days after the onset of Ramadan.  This is the most festive of Islamic holidays and is marked by the donning of new clothes, feasting, and family gatherings.

There are rich traditions of poetry in both Arabic speaking societies and in Iran, formerly Persia which is the spiritual center of Shi’a Islam.  Poets have been considered to have a special duty to speak to social and moral conditions and to hold rulers to the high standards of Allah.  While they are often revered by the masses they are often harassed, imprisoned, or even killed by unamused religious and state authorities.

Kazim Ali.

Kazim Ali is a British born Muslim of Indian descent.  He was educated in the United States with a BA from University of Albany-SUNY, and an MFA from New York University.  Ali’s poetry collections include The Far Mosque (2005), The Fortieth Day (2008), Sky Ward (2013), and Inquisition (2018).  Today’s selection, Ramadan, comes from The Fortieth Day.

Ramadan

You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,
and have to choose between the starving month’s

nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.
The liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter?

If the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets
into the air and harvest the fog.

Hunger opens you to illiteracy,
thirst makes clear the starving pattern,

the thick night is so quiet, the spinning spider pauses,
the angel stops whispering for a moment—

The secret night could already be over,
you will have to listen very carefully—

You are never going to know which night’s mouth is sacredly reciting
and which night’s recitation is secretly mere wind—

—Kazim Ali

Ramadan: A Poem was written by Musa Burki and was found on the website Virtual Mosque.

Ramadan: A Poem

A time for our hearts to become unsealed
Reflecting on the divine words revealed
The month which we hope to never end
Unable to count the infinite blessings it sends

Asked by our Lord to give up our worldly pleasures
So that we may receive His divine treasures
It’s a time that comes but once a year
Yet the moments which we hold most dear
The nights spent in prayer and reflection
Prepares the soul for redemption
Praying to our Creator for mercy and wisdom
Pleading to be admitted into His kingdom

We welcome you, O Ramadan, with joy as our guest
Having to subdue our egos as a test
You mend our hearts and give us tranquility
As we engage in battling our iniquity

Solidifying the bonds of kith and kin
Washing away the stain of sin
Fasting not only of body but of speech
It is Your benevolence which we beseech

O Ramadan, you have blessed us with your presence
Teaching us to grow from our spiritual adolescence
Continue to be the month which will always bless
Helping us to alleviate our fears and distress

         —Musa Burki
 

 

Feminists Launched a Bold New Militancy With the Washington Women’s Suffrage Procession of 1913

The stunning program cover for the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington.

Note—This has become an annual post because it is much requested.  It is also a timely reminder of the importance of bold action

The giant Women’s March on Washington and sister marches across the country that greeted Donald Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017 and they-said-it-couldn’t-be-done even larger marches a year later were seismic events that brought a broad, united, new intersessional feminism to the forefront of American social and political life after years on the defense as hard-fought gains once thought secure were under attack at every level.

Mass demonstrations no matter how large, critics maintained, had lost their power as the media lost interest in them and the public became bored.  Huge anti-war demonstrations that broke all records were barely covered by the press and had no discernible effect on curtailing a vastly unpopular war in Congress or in the Bush administration and only moderately moved the needle during the Obama years when painfully slow withdrawals of boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan were matched by a brutal escalation of bombing and drone attacks not only in those two countries but across the region.

The Women's March on Washington was a rough welcome to Trump and a game changer for the feminist movement.

Instead, the media became fixated with a shiny new object—the tiny but colorful Tea Party movement.  Events drawing a few dozen in silly hats waving Don’t Tread on Me" flags, and toting misspelled homemade signs received lead coverage night after night on network and cable TV news. Part of it was the sheer novelty of a right wing “grassroots” movement.  Traditional conservatives were at first dismissive and doubtful, but a hand-full of deep pocket millionaires saw potential and pumped unlimited money into the movement, created faux grassroots national organizations to “lead it,” and soon used it to capture the Republican Party for their oligarchical aims.  Within what seemed like a blink of an eye they were in control of dozens of state governments, Congress, and the Presidency and seemed capable of completely remaking America with no effective opposition.

But there were signs of restiveness and resistance—the Occupy Movement which spread like wildfire, the up-from-the-streets youth-led Black Lives Matter movement, the May Day Immigration Rights marches and the rise of the Dreamers, the New Civil Rights movement represented by Moral Mondays.  But it was the Women’s Marches, perhaps because they included so many middle class white women, that finally recaptured the media and nation’s attention. 

To its credit the Women’s March movement has, not always smoothly, taken pains to broaden its leadership and representation and to stand for an intersessional struggle that includes not just traditional feminist objectives like preserving abortion rights, removing obstacles to social and professional advancement, the Equal Rights Amendment, and election of women, but in support of Women of Color, immigrants and refugees, Muslims and other minority religions, the LBGTQ+ communities, Native Americans, the disabled, the labor movement, and environmentalists.  It was a perfect process and serious divisions remain over issues like electoral politics, particularly endorsement of Democrats, and levels of street militancy, but it was a game changer.

One 112 years ago today, another march of women in Washington, in some ways quite different, marked a radical turning point in the long struggle for women’s suffrage and became a spiritual ancestor of today’s movements.

Alice Paul was inspired by the militant campaigns of the British Suffragettes led by Emmeline Pankhurst seen under arrest in the right foreground and her daughter Christabel in custody behind her.

Alice Paul and Lucy Burns were uppity women.  Worse they were angry, uppity women.  They were more youthful than the dowagers whose decades’ long drive for women’s suffrage had been noble, but fruitless.  Paul had been in England and was impressed with how Christabel Pankhurst and her mother Emmeline, leaders of a new militant suffrage movement which was making a sensation by using direct action tactics such as publicly heckling politicians, window smashing, and rock throwing raising the profile of the cause there.

When Paul returned to the United States in 1910 she joined the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and soon advanced to a leadership role.  Although the national organization was committed to a state-by-state strategy as its top priority, Paul was made Chair of the Congressional Committee with the responsibility of lobbying for Federal action.  Carrie Chapman Catt, the formidable leader of the NAWSA, did not have much faith in Paul or her project, but was probably glad to have the gadfly out her hair in New York where she was carefully planning an elaborate political effort to win state approval of the Vote by referendum.

Carrie Chapman Catt of New York was the formidable head of the National American Women's Suffrage Association.  She would split with Alice Paul over strategy and style and the two were sometimes bitter rivals.  Their two pronged suffrage campaign, moderate and radical, actually complimented each other and help rapidly move to the goal.  But when the 19th Amendment was ratified, it was the moderate Catt, not the bur-under-the-saddle Paul who was invited to the Wilson White House.

By 1912 Paul and Burns set up shop in the Capitol as a semi-autonomous affiliate of the NAWSA called the Congressional Union.  

In the Presidential election that year, Catt had broken ranks with many older suffragists who were traditionally Republican, and endorsed Woodrow Wilson, a distinguished academic and supposedly a new breed of progressive Democrat, in the hopes that he would swing his party behind suffrage.

Paul, however, did not want to wait for a painfully slow lobbing process to nudge the new Chief Executive in the right direction.  She declared her intention to “hold his feet to the fire” from the very beginning with a huge Suffrage demonstration on the eve of his inauguration.
Don’t imagine a modern march on Washington with mobs of somewhat disorganized marchers in pink pussy caps carrying banners, signs, and puppets in a mass throng on the Capitol’s wide avenues.  Paul’s Woman Suffrage Procession was planned out with military precision, the thousands of women marchers were arrayed in designated units, marching abreast.  Most units wore white, the symbol of purity and adopted color of the suffrage movement.   The procession would be led by equestrians and floats with women as various allegorical figures broke up the ranks of marchers.  An elaborate program was printed for onlookers and a proper parade permit had been obtained from local authorities.

Wilson arrived by train from his New Jersey home on Monday, March 3, 1913, the day before his inauguration.  As the first Democrat since Grover Cleveland to break the grip of Republican dominance and as a man of known Southern roots and sympathies, he likely expected a whoopsie-do reception in the culturally Southern city.  Instead, only a handful of dignitaries, politicians, and the press were at hand.  Everybody else in town seems to have been lining Pennsylvania Avenue.

No wonder, for Paul had put on a dazzling show led by the beautiful blonde lawyer and activist Inez Milholland astride a white horse in flowing Greek robes.  Behind her, Paul and her friends, also on horseback, led 8,000 marchers, almost all women, and on parade. 
An estimated half a million onlookers crowded the route including cheering supporters, the idly curious, a lot of very, very angry men.

Mobs of men swarm and menace an ambulance trying to transport injured marchers as police stood by.  It took Army troops to restore order and allow the parade to finish.  Despite the violence, maybe because of it, Paul knew the Procession was a triumph.

The procession was quickly attacked by mobs of men along the route, throwing rocks and battering participants with clubs and fists as the police stood by without intervening.  Retaining as much courage and dignity as they could muster, the marchers continued on their route while running a virtual gauntlet.  Before the rear of the march reached its destination some hastily mobilized troops from Fort Myer arrived to provide some protection.  Over 800 marchers, almost all women, were injured in the attacks.

Reaction to the parade and the attacks threatened to overwhelm news of the Presidential inauguration the next day, much to the annoyance of Wilson.  And to the delight of Paul who regarded the operation as successful in every way. She was sure that public outrage would lead to greater support for the cause.

A subsequent investigation held the police derelict in their duty for failing to protect the lawful demonstration and the District of Columbia Police Chief was fired.

In New York Catt was less than thrilled and feared the bold confrontation would alienate male supporters critical for her state-by-state campaign.  None-the-less Catt staged her own giant parade down Fifth Avenue in May as the kick-off for her ballot initiative plan.  A fifth the marchers in her parade were men.

 The breach over militancy and confrontation between Catt and Paul became irreparable in 1914 and Paul’s group severed ties with the national organization.  Two years later they reorganized as the National Women’s Party (NWP.)  

   Alice Paul and her Federal strategy was big news in the New York Times.

They continued to press Wilson for action with daily picketing at the White House.  When the picketing continued even after the country entered the Great War in Europe, Wilson had Paul and dozens of her associates and supporters arrested, jailed, and force-fed during hunger strikes.  When word got out about the abuse, Wilson was embarrassed yet again. Exasperated, Wilson finally declared support of a Federal Constitutional Amendment for women’s suffrage as a “war measure” and in recognition of the contribution of women to the effort.  He made no mention of Paul or the NWP, but no one doubted that their stubborn militancy had forced his hand.

Both houses of Congress passed the 19th Amendment in 1919.  Then the battle moved to ratification by state legislatures and the state-by-state struggle advocated by Catt was back on.  The NAWSA and NWP played a kind of “good cop/bad cop” tag team on state legislatures with Catt’s group wooing them with compliments and charm, and Paul threatening disruption and defiance.

Alice Paul raises a grape juice toast to the banner that she and members of the National Women's Party sewed by hand to hang on their Washington, D.C. headquarters building in celebration of the ratification of the 19th Amendment just over 7 years after the Suffrage Procession--a remarkably swift victory.

It proceeded, all things considered, with astonishing speed. On August 19, 1920 Tennessee passed the Amendment by one vote in the legislature, securing the necessary support to become a part of the Constitution.  When the Secretary of State certified the adoption on August 26, Paul and her cohorts proudly unfolded a banner on the NWP headquarters building in Washington and toasted the event—with grape juice, of course.
 

 

King Kong was the Big Ape Who Saved RKO

 On March 2, 1933 King Kong opened at not one, but two enormous New York City movie palaces, 6,200-seat Radio City Music Hall and the 3,700-seat RKO Roxy across the street.  In the midst of the Depression it sold out 10 showings a day at both houses.  At ticket prices of $.35 to $.75 a pop, the flick grossed $89,931 over four days.

And that was just the beginning.  The film had its official premier to great hoopla three weeks later at Hollywood’s Grauman’s Chinese Theater and then went into general release to theaters across the country.  It went on to make more than $2 million dollars in its first domestic release and tons more internationally.

For the first time since being founded in 1929 RKO Radio Pictures turned a profit and leaped up in the ranks from just a notch above Poverty Row to status as one of the Major Studios alongside MGM, Warner Bros., Fox, Paramount, Universal, and Columbia.

That was excellent news for the studio which despite some early success with musicals and one Academy Award winning epic, Cimarron, was saddled with debt from the many deals that brought the elements of the studio together, many of them engineered by Joseph P. Kennedy who had walked away with a tidy personal profit.

Despite the success, however, by year’s end the studio was in receivership and would remain so until the 1940’s.  But without King Kong it would have collapsed entirely.

Young David O. Selznick had been brought on to get the studio out of the doldrums and succeeded by instituting the independent production unit system and signing new, bright stars who would pay off later—Irene Dunn, Katherine Hepburn, and Fred Astaire.  Among the behind the camera talent that Selznick lured was Merian C. Cooper, as a producer/director.

                                            Merian C. Cooper--pilot, warrior, adventurer, film maker.

Selznick was soon gone from RKO, but he laid the groundwork for a successful studio.  And none of his acquisitions was shrewder than Cooper.

Cooper was a larger than life character juggling multiple careers.  He was an Army Air Service bomber pilot in World War I who was shot down, badly scarred by fire in the crash, and sent to wait out war’s end in a German POW camp.  After the war he joined a volunteer American squadron in the Polish Air Force and fought against the Russians in the Polish-Soviet War.  Shot down once again and captured, he made a daring escape from notorious Lubianka Prison.  Cooper was decorated by Polish Commander-in-Chief Józef Piłsudski with the highest Polish military decoration, the Virtuti Militari.  Acclaimed as a Polish hero, his exploits were celebrated in a major film made before World War II in that country, The Starry Squadron.

Back in the states, Cooper became a booster of both military and civilian aviation.  He was on the founding Board of Directors and played a major role in steering Pan American Airlines.  He played a lead role in establishing the famous regularly scheduled Flying Boat passenger service between the U.S. and Europe.

In the 1920’s Cooper also became interested in making film documentaries.  Working for Paramount he produced, directed and starred in 1925’s Grass, depicting the migration of nomad herders in the remote Iranian highlands.  He followed that up in 1927 with Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, the saga of the fight for survival of a Thai farmer against the beasts of the jungle.  Combining documentary with re-staged footage, including a famous elephant stamped crushing a village, the film was a sensation.  Footage, including that stampede, would be used in other films, notably the Tarzan series, for years.

Merian C. Cooper, Willis H. O'Brien, Ernest B. Schoedsack, and Fay Wray on the set of King Kong.

Cooper’s associate on both films was Ernest B. Schoedsack, the principle cinematographer and co-director.  When Selznick hired Cooper for RKO, he brought Schoedsack with him.  He also took with him an idea he had developed while working on their last project for Paramount, a new version of the British Empire adventure story, The Four Feathers, parts of which were shot on location in the Sudan.

Cooper said the germ of an idea for a film came while observing a troop of baboons while on location.  But he also later claimed that the idea came to him in a dream while in a New York City hotel room.  The real inspiration, however, may have been a little seen 1927 serial by a very minor studio, Isle of Sunken Gold, which featured shipwrecked sailors and a beautiful woman fighting savage natives and their ape god “Kong” on a remote island.

Whatever the source, Cooper pitched a film featuring an ape fighting lizard monsters represented by Komodo dragons with location shooting in the Dutch East Indies and Africa.  Aghast at the cost, Paramount turned him down, making it easier for Selznick to lure him away with a promise that he could produce films of his own development in addition to studio assignments.

Once at RKO, however, Cooper put his ape film on hold to first develop the adventure yarn The Most Dangerous Game about a big game hunter and his companions on a jungle island where they are hunted for sport by a mad Cossack.  The film stared a young Joel McRae, and featured the female lead from The Four Feathers, young Canadian actress Fay Wray .who was making a name for herself playing ingénues.  Veteran silent screen actor Robert Armstrong was in the film.  Composer Max Steiner worked on the score.  The studio built an elaborate and expensive jungle set for the film.

But that was not Cooper’s only project.  He was also assigned to rescue a way over-budget production called Creation, an adventure yarn about shipwrecked sailors on an island with dinosaurs.  The giant reptiles were created in stop-motion animation by special effects whiz Willis O’Brien.

Stop action animation genius Wilis O'Brien with a Kong miniature.

When Cooper saw the early footage of O’Brien’s work, it all came together.  He resurrected his ape idea with O’Brien’s dinosaurs substituting for his original komodo dragons.   And he recognized that O’Brien could also create the ape, meaning that no remote location shooting would be necessary.  In addition he could use the Most Dangerous Game jungle set to save even more money.  He kept Wray and Armstrong from that film and cast the cheaper, first time actor Bruce Cabot as a rugged romantic leading man instead of established star McRae.

Cooper pitched the idea to Selznick who overrode a nervous corporate board to green light the now affordable production.

Popular British adventure novelist Edgar Wallace was bought in to flesh out Cooper’s sketchy ideas.  He was to create a novel in addition to a screen play so that the film could be advertised as “based on a novel by…”  Wallace produced notes which broadly outlined a story, but died before actual work on the script began.  None the less, Selznick kept his name on the credits with Cooper for the original story.

Cooper worked with Dangerous Game screenwriter James A. Creelman from Wallace’s notes.  Numerous changes were made, the most important being scrapping the shipwreck angle and changing the leader of an expedition to find the mythical ape from a big game hunter to a documentary director modeled on Cooper himself.

RKO journeyman writer Horace McCoy contributed to the script adding the worshiping natives and the giant wall to keep the Ape from their village.  Scenes to bring the Ape to display in New York were worked over.

The resulting script ran long with too much exposition and clunky dialoged.  Cooper brought in Ruth Rose, an experienced screen writer, actress and wife of old associate and co-director Schoedsack.  She greatly streamlined the script cut useless exposition, and created snappy dialogue.  Her biggest contributions, however, were in honing the characters.  Movie director Carl Denham became even more closely modeled on Cooper.  The tough but tender First Mate on the expedition ship, Jack Driscol was based on Cooper’s perennial second, Schoedsack.  The naïve young actress lured from the streets of New York to play the lead in the film-with-in-the-film was basically Rose herself.

Steiner was hired to do a score, but bean-counting executives told him to adapt and re-use existing material in the company archives instead of writing a new score.  Cooper personally paid the composer $50,000 to write one anyway.  The result was a masterpiece which re-wrote the book on scoring for film in the post-silent era.  After the movie made boatloads of money, the studio reimbursed Cooper for his investment.

When the Most Dangerous Game finally wound up production, shooting began on the Ape film, which still did not have a final name.  The complex nature of the production, including long sessions of stop-action work and complex scenes integrating Wray and live performers with working models of the Ape in addition to conventional live action footage, broke up shooting into several segments produced over nine months.  Cooper and Schoedsack divided directorial duties with Cooper handling the stop-action and special effects scenes and his friend the live action work with the actors.

There was so much time between various shoots that Wray completed two more horror pictures,  post-production re-shoots of Most Dangerous Game scenes and starring in  Dr. X at Warner Bros.  Cabot also squeezed in another film and Cooper had to oversee other RKO projects.

Fay Wray in Kongs grasp.

The slender Wray, a natural brunette, was given a blonde wig to stand out better against Kong’s dark fir after nearly losing the part to Ginger Rodgers or Jean Harlow.  She spent a day recording her famous screams, which she later referred to as "my best dialogue."  King Kong and the other two horror pictures secured her reputation as the first in a long line of movie heroine screamers.

In the climactic scene when Kong is attacked by biplanes, Cooper himself, the experienced aviator, played a pilot and Schoedsack his machine gunner.

King Kong on top of the world in his final battle.

The first cut of the film ran to more than 130 minutes.  Cooper slashed a scene in which sailors pursuing Kong are shaken off a log by the ape over a deep arroyo and fall to the ground to be eaten by giant spiders.  The scene so upset preview audiences that many left the theater.  That footage has been lost, but is still sought after.  

There was plenty of gore and violence left in the film in its final 90 minute cut. There was also a titillating scene where Kong undresses the heroine with his finger.

RKO spared no expense in promoting King Kong at theaters in its general release.

The whole package was thrilling and awed the critics and public alike.  It also remained a cash cow for the studio, which was frequently in financial trouble.  RKO re-released it in 1938, 1942, 1946, 1952, and 1956 and made money every time.  The 1952 release alone made $4 million.  By 1956 the studio had ceased to exist as a production unit, but lived on revenues from its catalogue.  After the ’56 release it was sold in syndication to television where it made more money yet.

But after the first release, the original cut was lost.  The strenuous Motion Picture Production Code had come into existence forcing several graphically violent scenes to be cut as well as Wray’s partial disrobement.  The cut footage was long thought to be lost, but in the early ‘60’s a complete 16 mm print was discovered and scenes were restored from that.  Still later a 35 mm was discovered in London and a new master negative struck from that.  Versions shown now on cable and streaming are from restorations of that print.

Based on the success of this film, Cooper was elevated to head of production at RKO after Selznick departed.  He ushered in the successful Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films and a series of memorable films with Katherine Hepburn.  He later worked for Selznick’s independent shop and then at MGM.
 
He interrupted his film career to return to the service in World War II where he commanded the first flights over the Hump between India and Burma, served as Clair Chennault’s second in command in China, and finally was chief of staff to the Fifth Air Force Bomber Command.  By the end of the war he was a brigadier general.

Cooper returned to his film career.  In 1949 he also re-united with his King Kong associates Schoedsack, screen writer Ruth Rose, special effects master Willis O’Brien, and actor Robert Armstrong to make The Mighty Joe Young. He was the producer of some of John Ford’s finest films including Wagon Master, Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, and The Searchers.  He also contributed to the development of technological breakthroughs like Cinerama.

King Kong is still considered a classic.  A lot of the credit goes to O’Brien’s ape, particularly the subtle expressions that he created on Kong’s face in close-ups.  In this regard neither of two flashy remakes comes close to granting the ape an odd humanity.  And much of the credit must also go to the script which in addition to thrilling action developed a real relationship between the tormented Ape and his beautiful obsession, Ann.

"...it was Beauty killed the Beast."

And then there was that last line, one of the best in movie history.  Surveying the corpse of the monster, producer Dunham observes to an awe struck cop, “…it wasn’t the airplanes...it was Beauty killed the Beast.”