The Wayward Pedigree of that No Account Hound Dog

 

The sleeve of Elvis Presley's RCA single of Hound Dog featured a photo of him singing to a real dog on the Steve Allen show.

It was on this date in 1958 that Elvis Presley’s version of Hound Dog was certified as selling three million copies in the United States a little more than two years after it was released on July 12, 1956.  It was only the third record ever to hit that mark, and it did it in much shorter time than the others, both Christmas perennials—Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and Gene Autry’s Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.  If there had ever been any doubt that the landscape of American popular music was made over by an epic earthquake, there was none anymore.

Presley's Gold Record for Hound Dog is on display at Graceland in Memphis.

Jazz based dance music had dominated the scene since the 1920s.  But times—and economics—were changing.  A long musician’s strike against the major record labels at the end of World War II taught popular singers to put out product without the backing of Big Bands.  The Bands themselves were enormously expensive to keep on the road.  During the late ‘40s hundreds folded leaving only a handful of big names and big draws still on the road.  Radio stations found it cheaper to play records than broadcast live programs from their studios or remotes from hotels and ballrooms.

After decades of Depression and war the public seemed to yearn for something simpler, sweet, even nostalgic.  It was an era of love songs and ballads where melody triumphed rhythm and of close harmony groups, both Black and White.

Around the edges of the culture, niche alternatives were on the rise.  The raw styles of country and urban blues were morphing into a new style, dubbed rhythm and blues or R&B which attracted wide Black audiences and appealed to daring whites.  Hillbilly and cowboy music were merging into a new style called Country and Western and stars like Hank Williams were beginning to attract fans all over the country.

Meanwhile with the Big Bands on the wane, Jazz musicians were freed from rigid charts and arrangements and a return to the form’s improvisational roots took startling new directions.  Be Bop combos were pushing the edge of music—but it was “listening” music, not dance numbers and was too complex and sophisticated for the new generation of teens who just wanted music they could party to.

It was in this post-war time that Rock & Roll began to emerge.  The origins of the style reach back—some blues recordings from as early as 1939 had elements of the new sound.  There are various candidates for the first true rock & roll song.  Among them That’s All Right Mama by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup in 1946 (Presley’s covered his first hit record in ’54); Wynonie Harris’s 1948 version of Ray Brown’s Good Rockin’ Tonight; Rock This Joint by Jimmie Preston and the Prestonians in 1949; Saturday Night Fish Fry by Louis Jordan and The Tympany Five the same year; and Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats in 1951.

All of those were by Black artists growing directly out of urban blues infused with a raucous style and driven my electric guitars and/or saxophones.  Others argue it wasn’t really rock & roll until it was done by White musicians and the introduction the Country and Western based Rockabilly.  For those folks, former country yodeler Bill Haley with his new band the Comets recorded Crazy Man Crazy in 1953 and the break-away hit Rock Around the Clock in ’54 represents the true birth of rock & roll.

The same year Sam Phillips was assembling his stable of young Rockabillies for his Sun Record Label in Memphis—Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, all of them familiar with call and response, blues, and Black gospel music.  And they mined those songs as covers or inspirations for original tunes.  They were shaking up music and getting air play from powerful disc jockeys with big teen age followings.  By ’55 the rock & roll revolution was on—but not yet won.

So how did a silly song about a dog become the cultural steamroller that made Pressley truly a mega star and make infant rock & roll the undisputed leviathan of pop music?  Well, to begin with it wasn’t about a dog….

Leiber and Stoller on the Tonight Show with Jack Parr.

The answer lies in the often overlooked “third root” of rock and roll—the largely Jewish New York based professional songwriters, most laboring for music publishers, who had been interpreting Black cultural for most of the 20th Century from Tin Pan Alley to the legendary Brill Building.  In the case of Hound Dog, the unlikely perpetrators were a pair of 19 year old upstarts, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller who already had some success peddling Hard Times for Charles Brown and Kansas City for Little Willie Littlefield recording as K. C. Loving, both moderate R&B hits in 1952.

In August of that year they were invited to meet Big Mama Thornton, a raw edged blues belter who was struggling to gain a foothold on Peacock Records.  They were introduced by band leader Johnny Otis.  They watched her rehearse and were impressed—and a little frightened, Leiber later said.

After casting about for ideas they came upon using some Black street slang for a pimp or a gigolo living off a woman.  The song was to be about her kicking him to the gutter.  Once the idea took shape, the song itself came quickly.  The pair reported jotting it down in ten or fifteen minutes on the car ride back to Stoller’s apartment.  They were so excited that they turned right around and came back to Otis’s place where Leiber rushed to the piano and pounded it out standing up singing:

You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog

Quit snoopin’ ‘round my door

You can wag your tail

But I ain’t gonna feed you no more.

 

Big Mama Thortons's down and dirty shout was an R&B hit but little heard by white audiences.

Stoller and Leiber took over from Otis in producing the recording session for Peacock after Otis had to sit in as drummer and couldn’t run the session.  The record was released in February 1953 to positive trade reviews and hit it big in Black urban areas.  It spent fourteen weeks on the Billboard R&B charts, seven of them at number one and was the #3 R&B hit of the whole year.

Although most White Americans never heard the record, its success spawned numerous “answer songs.”  These songs kept Peacock Records attorneys working overtime on copyright infringement cases.  The most notable of those actions was against Sam Phillips who claimed writing credits for an answer song Bear Cat performed by Rufus “Hound Dog” Thomas.  It was Sun Record’s first big hit.  But when the courts found Phillips guilty, the fines and court costs nearly bankrupted the label.  To save the company he had to sell the contract of his hottest property, Presley, to RCA Victor.

 Among the most unusual of several covers was a Western Swing version by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. 

 

Elvis got permission to use Freddie Bell and the Bellboys' sanitized lyrics and arrangement and even borrowed Bell's hip swiveling.

But the most influential was Philadelphia based Teen Records version by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, a White group which had become an established Las Vegas lounge act.  Bell sanitized the lyrics for white audiences, just as the early songs of Little Richard and other Black acts were.  All the sexual innuendo was either removed and replaced by new lyrics or obscured.  Just having the song sung by a man muddied the original core metaphor.  The new version went:

You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog

Cryin’ all the time.

You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog

Cryin’ all the time.

Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit

And you ain’t no friend of mine.

This sanitized version was now literally about a dog.  Unfortunately for Bell, tiny Teen Records did not have the muscle to make his recording anything more than a local Philadelphia hit.

While all of this was going on Leiber and Stoller themselves became hot commodities.  They established their own label, Spark Records producing hits like Smokey Joe’s Cafe for The Robins.  The label was later bought by Atlantic which left the boys in charge of their own division with the freedom to produce for other labels as well.  Now high-powered song writer/producers, they were soon churning out hit after hit in a legendary career.

In 1956 Presley was on the hunt for new material for RCA.  As an ardent blues fan he knew and admired Big Mama Thornton’s original and of course was very familiar with Rufus Thomas’s ill-fated Sun label answer.  Friends also reported that he liked to whistle and sing along with the Bob Wills version.  So, the song was on Presley’s mind when he and his backup band caught Bell’s act at the Silver Queen Bar and Cocktail Lounge in the Sands Casino.  Bell was doing it as a comedy change-up number, a virtual burlesque including gyrating choreography all to a three beat so called “Latin riff.”  Presley asked Bell for permission to record it, to which Bell eagerly agreed, hoping that it would hype sales of a planned LP that would include his own version.

Presley tried it out in live performances through the spring of ’56.  Like Bell, he used it as comic relief.  Audience reactions were strong.  But when he closed one of his biggest dates yet in front of 7000 hometown Memphis fans at the Cotton Festival the response was overwhelming.  It became his closing number for many years.

Elvis first performed Hound Dog on national television on the Milton Berle Show with the hip gyrations, not as legend has it on the Ed Sullivan Show.  Sullivan showcased Presley after Berle and Steve Allen but insisted he be shot only from the waist up to prevent his family audience from being scandalized.

He next tried it out on his first big national TV appearance on the Milton Berle Show on June 2.  On Berle’s advice he performed for the first time without his guitar and his hip swinging gyrations became a national sensation and scandal.  Appearing on the Steve Allen Show a few weeks later, Presley good naturedly let Allen turn the song into a parody of a parody crooning to a basset hound while in white tie and tails.

On July 2, 1956, the morning following the Allen show, Presley took it to RCA’s New York recording studios and it was released a scant two weeks later with Don’t Be Cruel on the B side. It was an immediate cross-genre hit.  It scored #1 on both the Country and Western and R&B Billboard charts and rose to #3 on the pop charts that year.  Radio stations around the country were blasting the tune and juke boxes were collecting nickels as never before.  The whole country was listening to Pressley and his Hound Dog.

Stoller was using some of his new wealth on a European vacation while all of this was going on and was unaware of it.  He returned to the States on the ill-fated liner Andrea Doria which sank after collision with another liner off of Nantucket.  Stoller was among the passengers rescued and Leiber was at the New York dock to greet him on July 26 with some startling news.

In their mutual memoirs, Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography they would recall that Leiber said:  “We got a smash hit on Hound Dog,” Stoller said, “Big Mama’s record?” And Leiber replied: “No. Some white guy named Elvis Presley.”  Stoller went on to comment, “I heard the record and I was disappointed. It just sounded terribly nervous, too fast, too white. But you know, after it sold seven or eight million records it started to sound better.”

Indeed.

The Civil Works Administration Was FDR's Preview of the WPA

 

This symbol of the Civil Works Administration seven month pilot program was placed on, many of the brick and mortar public works projects built.

 

On November 8, 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced plans to create the new Civil Works Administration which, he said, would provide up to 4 million jobs for the unemployed while doing important work building roads, bridges, sewer lines, and other infrastructure.  In a 5-month run over the Winter of 1933-34 over a billion dollars was spent putting people to work.

The basic idea was improved and expanded upon as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) funded by Congress in the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935.  The WPA was on its way to becoming the single biggest program of the New Deal under the personal supervision of FDR’s most trusted aide, Harry Hopkins.

 By 1933 unemployment was staggering--approaching a third of the work force in some cities and even higher in small, one industry towns.  Here men are lined up in a bread line that wraps around a block. Agitation like the Bonus March by unemployed veterans in 1932 and a return march the next year and raucous demonstrations of the unemployed led by the Communist Party, IWW Unemployed Workers Unions, and anarchists were scaring the crap out of business interests who began to fear revolution.  The Roosevelt Administrations public work employment projects were a safety valve against such an explosion.

Unlike the companion Civilian Conservation Corps, which was designed for younger workers, many of them single, to get them out of the cities where they might otherwise become idling malcontents and easy prey to Reds and agitators, the WPA was aimed squarely at economic heads of households to provide employment where they lived.  This meant that the overwhelming majority of enrollees were men.  Where women were enrolled, their husbands were typically absent, disabled, elderly, or had been unable to find work in at least 5 years.

To counter concerns by the labor movement that public employment would undercut union wages, pay was figured on an adjustable scale dependent on whether the area was urban or rural, local cost of living, and prevailing wages.  To counter employer fears that workers would never leave government jobs when private employment picked up, workers were limited to 30 hours per week.  In the work-starved Depression years, a WPA job meant a livable, but not generous support for families.

After some early stumbles, Blacks, Native Americans, and other minorities were represented at or above their percentage of the workforce.  In the South, however, work gangs were segregated, more skilled jobs limited or forbidden to Blacks, and wages unequal.  

The originally conceived public works projects changed the face of America transforming both the urban environment and a road system that at the beginning of the Depression was still built for the horse and wagon.  By June of 1941 the WPA reported that over $4 billion was spent on highway, road, and street projects; more than $1 billion on public buildings; and more than $1 billion on publicly owned or operated utilities.

But the range of work undertaken was astonishing.  Women were employed in sewing projects that produced uniforms for the CCC and military.  There were programs to distribute surplus commodities and provide school lunches.  A popular program built libraries and provided library services, including bookmobiles to underserved rural and urban areas.

One of the most controversial aspects of the WPA were its programs to provide work for the white collar unemployed, as well as laborers.  WPA projects employed engineers, draftsmen, accountants and bookkeepers, lawyers, and supervisors as needed.  Teachers were employed in pilot education projects and to train workers in job skills.  Most controversial were the programs to provide work for writers, visual, and dramatic artists.  

A shelf of WPA State Guides.  Among the noted writers who were employed by the Federal Writers' Project were Conrad Akin, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Kenneth Rexroth, Studs Terkel, Eudora Welty, Dorothy West, Richard Wright, and Frank Yarby. 

 

The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) employed thousands of writers, including many of minority and working class origin, on a wide range of projects, the most famous of which were The State Guidebooks.  These books were assembled for each state and territory and included comprehensive reviews of the history, geography, economic development, and ethnography of each state.  The books were printed in uniform editions by the states.  Today they are considered invaluable resources for any researcher.

 

Many WPA murals decorating public buildings celebrated local history, industry, and workers.  Mail Transportation by Fletcher Marin decorated the San Pedro, California Post Office.

Likewise, the Federal Art Project (FAP) employed artists to produce more than 200,000 separate works including posters, murals, and paintings.  The art, particularly the murals, installed in public buildings, schools, libraries, train stations, and elsewhere helped transform public space.  Many works are still considered classic treasures.  Others have been destroyed by demolition of the building they were in or were mutilated by renovation and being painted over.  Today WPA art is being re-discovered, treasured, and restored in many places where it has been found.

Artists and writers naturally comment on the world around them.  Although the majority of work by both projects was apolitical, many efforts vocally supported the labor movement, protested racial injustice, and advocated for the rights of women.  These voices were bitterly denounced by conservatives who waged a relentless, but unsuccessful campaign to defund these WPA agencies.

Conservatives also decried many of the public works projects as unnecessary make work and accused WPA workers of shovel leaning and other laziness.

 

WPA projects like this approach to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco under construction transformed the nation.

Despite these criticisms by the time that the WPA was ended in 1943 amid the essentially full employment caused by World War II, it had spent a staggering for the time $11 billion.  It was the largest single employer in the country.  In the peak year of 1938, it employed 3.3 million people—nearly every person eligible under the program’s guidelines. It has been called the most successful of all New Deal programs not only for putting people back to work, but for the transformative legacy of its public works projects.

Light Triumphs Over Darkness at Diwali

 

There are many Festivals of Light celebrated by religions and cultures around the world including Christmas, Chanukah, and Winter Solstice observances familiar in the West.  But none are more colorful or enjoyed with such gleeful abandon a Diwali, the Hindu festival of the victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance.  In most of the Northern Hemisphere the five-day holiday begins this year today, November 8, and reaches its peak on Thursday, the third day of the celebration. 

The large Indian diaspora in the United Kingdom, South Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, Fiji, the United States and elsewhere has spread observances across the globe.

Typically, during the celebration, temples, homes, shops, and workplaces are brightly illuminated.  In most of India the climax of the festival occurs on the third day coinciding with the darkest night of the Hindu solar month Kartika. In the Gregorian Calendar, it generally falls between mid-October and mid-November.  

 

Shopping in preparation for Diwali.

During the climax, revelers adorn themselves in their finest clothes, illuminate the interior and exterior of their homes with diyas (oil lamps or candles), offer puja (worship) to Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity and wealth, light fireworks, and enjoy family feasts, where mithai (sweets), and gifts are shared.

Details of the celebration vary across regions and even the names of each feast day change with local dialects and languages.  In much of southern India and in Sri Lanka Tamils celebrate the first day of Diwali as most significant.  Diwali is also a major cultural event for Jains and other religious minorities on the Indian Subcontinent.   The Sikhs celebrate Bandi Chhor Divas to mark the release of Guru Hargobind from a Mughal Empire prison.  Newar Buddhists, unlike other Buddhists, celebrate Diwali by worshipping Lakshmi, while the Bengali Hindus generally celebrate Diwali, by worshipping Goddess Kali.  Except for Muslims and the small minority of Indian Christians, pretty much the whole country takes off to party.  

 

                                        Young women of the Hindu diaspora light diyas. 

The Diwali festival is likely a fusion of harvest festivals in ancient India.  It is mentioned in Sanskrit texts such as the Padma Purana and the Skanda Purana both of which were completed in the second half of the 1st Millennium CE. The diyas are mentioned in Skanda Kishore Purana as symbolizing parts of the Sun, describing it as the cosmic giver of light and energy to all life and which seasonally transitions in the Hindu calendar month of Kartika. 

 

William Simpson labelled his chromolithograph of 1867 as Dewali, feast of lamps. It showed streets lit up at dusk, with a girl and her mother lighting a street corner lamp.

Most British, Commonwealth, and North American Hindu communities have their roots in the north of India and commonly celebrate these five days:

Day One—Dhanteras marks the beginning when people traditionally purchase some gold or silver or at least one or two new cooking utensils for good luck.

  

                                            The goddess Lakshmi. 

Day Two—Narak Chaturdasi is also called Choti Diwali when people take oil baths before sunrise with ubtan, a homemade paste of herbs that can be used as a soap, and a face or body mask.

 

A family celebrates with sparklers and new clothes. 

Day Three—Lakshmi Puja is the main and most festive day of the festival when people keep the house spotlessly clean and pure to welcome goddess Lakshmi. After a day of fasting sweets and gifts are shared.  Lamps are lit in the evening, and Lakshmi puja, a home religious observance celebrating the goddess with chants, mantras, and honoring ancestors.  Celebrations spill from homes and businesses into the streets with more lamp lighting, singing and dancing and public fireworks.

Day Four—Govardhan Puja or Padwa celebrates the love between husband and wife in commemoration of Parvati and her husband Shiva as well as the lifting the Govardhan mountain by Krishna to save a cowherd and farming communities from incessant rains and floods triggered by Indra’s anger.  It is thus also a harvest fest and day of thanksgiving marked by Annakut, the mountain of food. Communities prepare a meal of over one hundred dishes from a variety of ingredients, which is dedicated to Krishna before shared communally. Hindu temples on this day prepare and present mountains of sweets to the faithful who have gathered for darshan, a visit. In Gujarat, the day is also called Annakut is the first day of the new year and is celebrated through the purchase of sabras, the good things in life, such as salt, offering prayers to Krishna and visiting temples.

 

A sister feeds her brother by hand.  Many modern Hindus now celebrate Bhai Duj as an equal celebration of sibling love.

Day Five—Bhai Duj celebrates the bond between brother and sister.  Women of the family gather, perform a puja with prayers for the wellbeing of their brothers, then return to a ritual of feeding their brothers with their hands and receiving gifts. In some Hindu traditions the women recite tales where sisters protect their brothers from enemies that seek to cause him either bodily or spiritual harm. Often brothers travel to meet their sisters or invite their sister’s family to their village to celebrate their sister-brother bond with the bounty of seasonal harvests.

 

Variations on these are almost infinite in the complex world of Hinduism and customs can even vary from village to village in the same regions.  But the joy of the season is celebrated by more than 800 million people worldwide making it one of the largest religious festivals on the planet.

This year at Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Ridgefield, Illinois Darkness Doesn’t Get the Last Word will be the topic of today's 10 am services led by retired philosophy professor Jim Gould. 

Ideology and Partisan Passions Obscure the Truth About Lenin the October Revolution

 

Carefully constructed Soviet mythology made the October Revolution in Russia all about Vladimir Lenin.

November 7 and 8 mark one of the most important events of the 20th Century and arguably a fulcrum point history—before this, things were this way, after quite another.  That presents a significant challenge for a blogger who trades in history.  On one hand the October or Bolshevik Revolution on November 7, 1917—October 25 under the old Orthodox calendar—is too big to ignore.  On the other hand, the tale is so epic and complex that a wordy son-of-a-bitch like me with a tendency to digress and go off on tangents to explain every detail so I couldn’t confine myself to a manageable post.

That's a problem because Americans in general know damned little about what happened 105 years ago beyond that some bald guy with a pointy beard and cloth cap named Lenin was the boss of the whole thing, grainy workers and soldiers in baggy clothes swarmed the streets in 15 second newsreel clips, there were Commies involved, and the old Tsar got the heave-ho and was eventually shot with his whole family except for somehow Anastasia who grew up to be Ingrid Bergman, or something.  Oh, and Dr. Zhivago was there.  Even that is not quite right—Vladimir Lenin could only wish he was in charge, events he helped spark soon a carried him along a wild ride that he spent years trying to gain control over.  And the Tsar had already been deposed months earlier during the February Revolution which resulted in the formation of a socialist Provisional Government eventually led by Alexander Kerensky while restive workers and soldier organized themselves into councils called Soviets.

And all this transpired while there was an ongoing bloody stalemate on the Eastern Front of the Great War between Imperial German and Austro-Hungarian forces and exhausted, demoralized Russian levies.  See?  Complicated stuff.

Soviet Realist art tried hard to cast Lenin as the single hero of a glorious revolution.  Although Americans have been taught to think of him as an evil Commie, they have largely accepted the myth that it was all about the bald man.

Beyond the misinformed or mal-informed majority, the Russian Revolution in particular the Bolshevik uprising are matters of intense interest on the Left and are often studied in excruciating detail and argued over by adherents of various ideologies or Marxist sects.  They pour over thick tomes of historical documentation and polemical analysis.  For all but hard core unreformed old Stalinists—more on them in a moment—these folks argue passionately over exactly when the Revolution that seemed the fruition of so many hopes and dreams went South.  Anarchists argue very early as Lenin and his chief lieutenant Leon Trotsky, soon the head of the Red Army and chief enforcer of ideological purity, grappled to tame the tiger they had unleashed.  They will pick, generally, the suppression of the Mahknovists in the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War that followed the Revolution, or the crushing of the Kronstadt Sailors’ Uprising in 1921.  Council Communists and followers of German Marxist heroine Rosa Luxemburg will peg the date a little later.  Trotskyites will blame Stalin.

Of course, Joseph Stalin, who ruthlessly took control of the Soviet Communist Party and the state, had his own trouble with the 1917 Revolution.  In the 1930’s he completely wiped out the remaining Old Bolsheviks who had participated in and witnessed what happened in 1917 and the immediate aftermath.  Dead men tell no tales.

So, any account I might offer up of those tumultuous days would cause my bones to be picked clean by those left sectarians for perceived deviations from their holy writ.

Vladimir Putin, an authoritarian with no fondness for revolutions, puts the kibosh on big official celebrations of the October Revolution, observances are left to relatively small gatherings of mostly elderly on Communists.

Despite all of this a lot of ink and electrons are spilled in commemoration of Red October.  Curiously, one place largely devoid of hoopla and celebration is Russia.  Vladimir Putin may be a former Soviet KGB agent who has often publicly bemoaned the end of the Soviet Union and the downfall of its vassal states and subsequent decline of Russian prestige as a superpower.  But it turns out that regret is only because the Soviet Union had recapitulated old Imperial Russia and extended its grip even further.  The former Communist embraced the restoration and elevation of the Orthodox Church which venerates Tsar Nicholas II and his family as martyrs and saints.  He has also celebrated the restoration Capitalism and it peculiarly Russian oligarchy of moguls and gangsters. 

A Banksi wall stencil aptly describes Putin's view of revolution now that he is the guy in power.

The last thing a natural autocrat like Putin who has dedicated himself to centralizing all levers of power into his hands as effectively as Lenin or Stalin, wants to celebrate is revolution.  In a speech in 2017 on the eve of the Revolution’s centennial Putin asked:

Let us ask ourselves: Was it not possible to follow an evolutionary path rather than go through a revolution?  Could we not have evolved by way of gradual and consistent forward movement rather than at a cost of destroying our statehood and the ruthless fracturing of millions of human lives?

In neither the current capital of Moscow, nor in the former Tsarist seat of St. Petersburg where most of the initial action took place are there any of the parades, fireworks, or mass celebrations one might expect scheduled.  In each city and in provincial centers a few hundred bedraggled old Communists, Great Patriotic War (World War II) veterans, and young Marxists will gather under the watchful eyes of the state security apparatus.  If the rallies get a little frisky don’t be surprised if they are roughly broken up and leaders arrested—or if the State forces pull back and allow Nationalist gangs—virtual neo-Nazis—to do the work for them.

So, what happened?  The thumbnail is that after years of mounting tensions since a failed 1905 Revolution, things came to a head due to war weariness and domestic food shortages.  The popular old Social Democratic Party was split between the Bolsheviks, whose name meant majority although they were in fact a small faction of the original party, and the Mensheviks who were further split over ending the war by a separate peace.  The Bolsheviks exerted growing control over the council and Soviets being built around the capital and had wide influence in the Army and especially among the sailors of the Baltic Fleet station at the Kronstadt navy yard. 

Women march in the February 1917 uprising the outed the Tsar.

In February 1917 strikes and street fighting forced the Tsar to abdicate.  The State Duma took over control of the country, establishing a Provisional Government and proclaiming a new Russian Republic. 

Lenin and other senior Bolsheviks were then in exile in Switzerland but the German government, hoping to stir up anti-war sentiment in Russia, let him and 32 others cross their territory in a sealed train to reach the re-named capital of Petrograd.  Lenin arrived at Finland Station late in February where he gave a fiery speech denouncing the Mensheviks who still had majorities in most Soviets, for cooperating with the Provisional Government and advocating an immediate truce with the Central Powers.  Documentaries that the Putin government allows to be broadcast on Russian television paint the once revered Lenin as a corrupt tool of the Kaiser for this arrangement—the same charge made against him in 1917 by moderate democrats and the Mensheviks.  Parallels are drawn between that and “Western interference” today in “Russian internal affairs” and identifying all dissidents as traitors.

Over the next month Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders busied themselves with rounds of speeches and a blizzard of party newspapers and pamphlets attacking the Provisional Government and ramping up demands for an end to the war with escalating rhetoric.  They also worked more quietly to build support in the main Soviets around Petrograd. 

Provisional Government head Alexander Kerenski--a moderate socialist determined to "win the war." not end it.

Meanwhile the Mensheviks and elements of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR), ousted the original leadership of the Provisional Government which was dominated by liberal aristocrats and moderate democrat intellectuals and formed a coalition government under Kerensky who was tied to a SR dissident faction. Kerensky came to power in July and maintained a policy opposed to a separate peace because it would mean massive territorial losses to the Central Powers.   

After a Provisional Government ballyhooed offensive at the front on July 1 quickly collapsed, Lenin and Bolshevik leaders called for mass demonstrations of soldiers, sailors, and workers demanding immediate peace and the resignation of “Capitalist Ministers.”  It was intended to be a massive show of popular power that might topple or shake the Government. The first demonstrations broke out on July 3 led by the soldiers of a machine gun regiment and Bolshevik activists from the Soviets.  It was quickly repressed.  The Prime Minister resigned on July 7 leaving Kerensky in sole charge.

Kerensky ordered the arrest of Lenin, Trotsky and other major Bolshevik leaders and the suppression of the party.  Lenin went underground. Trotsky escaped immediate arrest.  Plans were laid for an even bigger demonstration on July 15 in which as many as 500,000 were said to have taken to the streets.  Kerensky and his allies saw it as an attempted insurrection and ordered loyal troops and the Gendarme to attack the marchers.  Hundreds were killed and Trotsky and many other leaders were arrested.

Lenin was in Finland but rushed to Petrograd.  He narrowly escaped capture and eluded authorities.  After a period in safe houses, he again slipped into neighboring Finland.  Bolshevik power was effectively checked by the harsh repression following the July Days and many historians blame the disaster on the weak leadership and discipline the Bolsheviks actually had over the angry rebels who parroted their slogans.

Lenin spent much of this period in an exercise fit for his intellectual temperament—writing a book, The State and Revolution, an exposition on how he believed the socialist state would develop after the proletariat revolution, and how from then on, the state would gradually wither away, leaving a pure communist society.  Although the manifesto, which was not published until after the October Revolution became the ideological bedrock of later Marxist-Leninism and something of a fetish, it distracted Lenin from organizing the details of a resurgent movement in Russia. 

Under Stalin the Soviets were so diligent about erasing Trotsky from history and destroying or altering pictures of him during the Revolution that authentic contemporary photos of him are hard to find.  This photo probably dates from the early Civil War when he was in charge of defending the Revolution.

Much of that work was left to Trotsky and his lieutenants who eluded capture.  Their work concentrated among the troops and sailors and in the Soviets but was scattershot and not the well-oiled machine the Party as often portrayed.

The efforts were assisted by the continuing deterioration of conditions in the country.  Not only were war losses staggering, but across the country’s industrial production collapsed amid the growing chaos throwing millions to unemployment and near starvation.  Agricultural production was devastated by the levies for the mammoth, but ill-equipped Army that stripped peasants from the fields and the near collapse of the railway system.

In August a threatened Rightist Army coup forced Kerensky to appeal to the Petrograd Soviet, including its Bolshevik members for support resulting in the formation of an armed Red Guards of the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) to confront the threat.  The coup fizzled and its troops never threatened the capital.  But Kerensky opened the door to renewed Bolshevik influence in the Soviets.  Trotsky was elected President of the Petrograd Soviet, and the Moscow Soviet was also soon in Party hands.

In late October Bolsheviks began to plan an uprising built around the Red Guards and dissident Army units at meeting held at the Smolny Institute.  On November 6 (Oct. 23 Old Style) the Bolshevik Central Committee voted 10–2 for a resolution announcing “an armed uprising is inevitable, and that the time for it is fully ripe.”

The next day with Lenin as an enthusiastic cheerleader if not the actual organizer, the MRC struck occupying key points around the Capitol and securing rail connections to prevent loyalist troops from being able to rally to the Provisional Government.  Kerensky could not rally significant forces to oppose the moves and seeing the writing on the wall managed to barely escape the city in a Renault car obtained from the American Embassy. He hoped to meet loyalist troops and return re-take power.

3,000 demoralized military cadets, officers, Cossacks and a contingent of female soldiers defended the Winter Palace where the rest of the Provisional Government was hold up.  By evening the cadets and the Cossacks abandoned the defense taking artillery with them as huge mobs of Red Guards, fleet sailors, soldiers, and workers thronged menacingly around the building. 

One of the most iconic and often reproduced images of the October Revolution--Red Guards on an automobile patrol the streets of Petrograd.

At 2:30 am November 8 (Oct. 24 Old Style) the Navy cruiser Aurora fired symbolic blank shots at the Palace.  The insurgents rushed forward virtually unopposed.  Red Guards gained entrance to the Palace via a back door left carelessly unlocked and after wandering around the cavernous splendor of the former home of the Tsars a small detachment finally stumbled on the terrified ministers and arrested them.

The Ministers and other officials were taken to the notorious prison at Fort Peter and Paul where they dutifully wrote out their resignations.  The Provisional Government ceased to exist.  Lenin, for his part, issued a stirring proclamation.

The "Glorious and Heroic" storming of the Winter Palace was more of an unopposed cake walk.  The Soviets need a myth of popular insurrection like the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution which was likewise exaggerated.

Soviet propaganda subsequently depicted the October Revolution and especially the Storming of the Winter Palace as epic struggles of heroic proportion.  In 1920 Lenin himself and thousands of Red Guards staged a glorious “reenactment” of the attack before an audience of 100,000 including members of the international press who were convinced it was an accurate description.  In 1926 Sergei Eisenstein’s film October: Ten Days That Shook the World based his thrilling scenes of mass struggle more on the re-enactment than the actual event.  Likewise, it was commemorated in Socialist Realist art, music, poetry, and novels.

In reality, in less than a day and a half of action just two people were killed and 18 arrested—the Provisional Government Ministers and senior officials.  Essentially it was a bloodless revolution.  The aftermath would be far from bloodless.

Power was handed over to the Second All Russian Congress of Soviets which by happy circumstance happened to meet on November 7.  With Trotsky in the Chair the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionary delegates walked out before they could be expelled.  As they filed out of the hall Trotsky taunted them:

You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history.

The Congress elected a Council of Peoples Commissars with Lenin at the head as the basis of a new Soviet Government, pending the meeting of a Constituent Assembly, and passed the sweeping but immediately unenforceable Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land.

But outside of Petrograd, Moscow and a few other major cities, support for the new government was thin.  Pushback began immediately.  Mensheviks staged their own coup in Georgia and declared an independent Republic.  The Don Cossacks also declared independence.  At the Front loyalist divisions and regiments began to organize against Red units.  Kerensky tried to return to Petrograd at the head of a large Cossack force but was quickly turned back in sharp fighting.  There was also street fighting in Moscow where it took a week for Leninists to put down.

A long, bloody counter-revolution and Civil War was at hand.  All too complex to revisit here.

Lenin kept his promise, and on December 19, 1917 Trotsky signed an armistice with the Central Powers on the new government’s behalf pending negotiation of a peace treaty.  As Kerensky feared, Germany and Austria-Hungary extracted a heavy price to end the war after they launched a new Eastern offensive despite the armistice in March of 1918.  The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ceded Latvia, all Russian Polish territory including Warsaw, and a portion of Ukraine.  In addition, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and most of the rest of Ukraine were promised “self-determination” with the expectation that they would declare independence.

The Allies, still waiting on an infusion of fresh American troops on the Western Front regarded the separate peace as a stab in the back.  With fears that the Bolshevik regime would encourage or abet mutiny and rebellion among their own troops and among their already restive working class they intervened militarily in the Soviet Far East with the hope of re-enforcing and linking up with White Armies in the Civil War.

Although Trotsky was a key figure in the October Revolution—much more the nuts-and-bolts-architect than the philosopher Lenin—and defended it through Red Terror response to the Civil War and as the ruthless commander of the Red Army, after he lost out to Joseph Stalin as Lenin’s heir. He was stripped of Party and Government Posts, exiled, and then virtually erased from revolutionary history. In exile he tried to rally foreign Communist Parties into opposition to Stalin and in defense of the True Revolution as he saw it.  For his pains he was assassinated with an ice climbing pick in Mexico in 1940 by a Stalinist agent. 

As noted much has been written about the October Revolution—much of which must be taken with a grain of salt and a jaundiced eye. But a good and entertaining start would be with American Journalist Jack Reed’s account published in 1919 based on his dispatches from Petrograd, Ten Days That Shook the World.  Journalism was a first draft of history. 

                                An early American edition of John Reed's journalism-as-history Ten Days That Shook the World.

Reed, best known previously for his creation of the Patterson Pageant which brought a whole Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) silk mill strike to the stage of New York City’s Madison Square Garden, was not a neutral observer.  He was a committed socialist and an admitted cheerleader for the Revolution.  He completed the book back in the United States where he was also active in founding the Communist Labor Party of America.  Threatened with arrest during the post-war American Red Scare, he fled back to the Soviet Union where he quickly became disillusioned by the repressive authoritarian tact the Revolution had taken.  In 1920 he died in Moscow of typhus where he was hailed a hero for his world-famous book despite his recent apostasy.  

Despite all of this Reed was a keen observer of what he witnessed unfolding.  He may not have been privy to the plans and plots of the Revolutionaries or the Provisional Government or had the benefit of examining key documents, but he could clearly report the evident events.  Moreover, he completed the book before Soviet authorities began to re-rewrite history.  As he wrote in his introduction:

This book is a slice of intensified history—history as I saw it. It does not pretend to be anything but a detailed account of the November Revolution, when the Bolsheviki, at the head of the workers and soldiers, seized the state power of Russia and placed it in the hands of the Soviets.