Dr Alberto G Garcia

SCOTTISH SECOND SIGHT

by

R.D. LAING, DIANA GABALDON,

AND THE TAISCH OF MY GRANDMOTHER

Primitive Capital Accumulation Part 1

Island of Skye.

As children, my sister and I sometimes traveled to the tiny town of Parkhill, Ontario, to visit my paternal grandmother, born Katherine MacDonald.  This Canadian town was so small and quiet that the local newspaper would announce our visit.

Grandma was a widow.  Her grander days in Chicago and St. Charles were behind her.  The geranium perfumes were left in bottles and the fur-collared coat kept in a closet. Aprons covered her dresses. She did still use lipstick, but now it mostly missed its mark. Yet her big-hearted, self-effacing and good-natured demeanor remained unchanged. 

Not much happened in and around my grandmother’s shingle-sided home, which was large but simple and sparsely-appointed. Occasionally I could hear the distant sound of an automobile passing on the unpaved street.  The slow movement of time was evident by the movement of light and shadow as the day progressed. Mechanical time made itself known by the abrupt eruption of loud chimes from an imposing grandfather clock.  

The Parkhill home.

Grandma was a big reader, as was I.  On one visit, when I was about 15 years old, I brought along a new book to read I had picked up at Krochs & Brentano’s bookstore in the Chicago Loop.  It was called The Politics of Experience by the psychiatrist and philosopher R.D. Laing.  That book had a profound influence on me.

More than 50 years later, I prefaced my own book, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia with a quote from Laing’s book:

Our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of un-learning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.

And immediate experience of, in contrast to belief or faith in, a spiritual realm of demons, spirits, Powers, Dominions, Principalities, Seraphim and Cherubim, the Light, is even more remote. As domains of experience become more alien to us, we need greater and greater open-mindedness even to conceive of their existence.

This quote from Dr. Laing seemed an appropriate introduction to a book about a man of such love and remarkable accomplishments as Dr. Alberto Garcia, a man who cultivated direct experience of a spiritual realm invisible to most. 

The Scottish Legacy

When reading The Politics of Experience in Parkhill, I didn’t know that Laing was a Scotsman.  Nor did I know less than 200 years ago, in Scotland fairies were said to freely gift the experience of Second Sight, the ability to see with the “third eye.”   The erudite Dr. Laing was undoubtedly familiar with the writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson about his travels to the remote and strange islands of the Scottish Highlands around 1774.  The Londoner Dr. Johnson was known in posthumous centuries as the most distinguished man of letters in English history.   

Dr. Samuel Johnson

During his travels to the islands, Dr. Johnson was confronted by the phenomenon of Second Sight.  In his book, he struggled to understand this seeming “breach of the common order of things.”

It is the common talk of the Lowland Scots, that the notion of the Second Sight is wearing away with other superstitions; and that its reality is no longer supposed, but by the grossest people.  How far its prevalence ever extended, or what ground it has lost, I know not.  The Islanders of all degrees, whether of rank or understanding, universally admit it, except the Ministers, who universally deny it, and are suspected to deny it, in consequence of a system against conviction.  One of them honestly told me, that he came to Skye with a resolution not to believe it.

By the term Second Sight, seems to be meant a mode of seeing, superadded to that which Nature generally bestows.  In the Earse it is called Taisch; which signifies likewise a spectre, or a vision. 

The Second Sight is an impression made either by the mind upon the eye, or by the eye upon the mind, by which things distant or future are perceived, and seen as if they were present.  A man on a journey far from home falls from his horse, another, who is perhaps at work about the house, sees him bleeding on the ground, commonly with a landscape of the place where the accident befalls him.  Another seer, driving home his cattle, or wandering in idleness, or musing in the sunshine, is suddenly surprised by the appearance of a bridal ceremony, or funeral procession, and counts the mourners or attendants, of whom, if he knows them, he relates the names, if he knows them not, he can describe the dresses.  Things distant are seen at the instant when they happen.  Of things future I know not that there is any rule for determining the time between the Sight and the event.

This receptive faculty, for power it cannot be called, is neither voluntary nor constant.  The appearances have no dependence upon choice: they cannot be summoned, detained, or recalled.  The impression is sudden, and the effect often painful.

That they should often see death is to be expected; because death is an event frequent and important.  But they see likewise more pleasing incidents.  A gentleman told me, that when he had once gone far from his own Island, one of his labouring servants predicted his return, and described the livery of his attendant, which he had never worn at home; and which had been, without any previous design, occasionally given him.

Our desire of information was keen, and our inquiry frequent.  [W]e heard many tales of these airy shows, with more or less evidence and distinctness.

Strong reasons for incredulity will readily occur…..  It is a breach of the common order of things, without any visible reason or perceptible benefit. 

Yet Dr. Johnson’s own intelligence, knowledge and attainments made it hard for him to reject the existence of Second Sight simply because it appeared to be contrary to the “common order of things.”  By

presuming to determine what is fit, and what is beneficial, they presuppose more knowledge of the universal system than man has attained…..

The holders of this talent in Scotland, however, bore no resemblance to those, like Issac Newton, who were well-known to have upended understandings of the world. To the most sophisticated and accomplished Johnson, it was hard to believe that such an ability would be found in a “a people” he perceived as  

very little enlightened; and among them, for the most part, to the mean and the ignorant.

On the other hand, their very simplicity and guilelessness (the absence of capitalist profit motive in the excercise of their Second Sight) was perhaps reason to take their reports seriously.

By pretension to Second Sight, no profit was ever sought or gained.  It is an involuntary affection, in which neither hope nor fear are known to have any part.

This faculty of seeing things out of sight is local, and commonly useless. 

 Those who profess to feel it, do not boast of it as a privilege, nor are considered by others as advantageously distinguished.  They have no temptation to feign; and their hearers have no motive to encourage the imposture.  [For the Highlanders,] there was neither shame from ignorance, nor pride in knowledge; neither curiosity to inquire, nor vanity to communicate.

To talk with any of these seers is not easy.  There is one living in [the island of] Skye, with whom we would have gladly conversed; but he was very gross and ignorant, and knew no English.  The proportion in these countries of the poor to the rich is such, that if we suppose the quality to be accidental, it can very rarely happen to a man of education; and yet on such men it has sometimes fallen.  There is now a Second Sighted gentleman in the Highlands, who complains of the terrors to which he is exposed.

The foresight of the Seers is not always prescience; they are impressed with images, of which the event only shews them the meaning.  They tell what they have seen to others, who are at that time not more knowing than themselves, but may become at last very adequate witnesses, by comparing the narrative with its verification.

To collect sufficient testimonies for the satisfaction of the publick, or of ourselves, would have required more time than we could bestow.….  I never could advance my curiosity to conviction; but came away at last only willing to believe. 

Upon examination of a broad range of human history, Dr. Johnson concluded that Second Sight is not in truth a breach in the order of things.

[C]onsidered in itself, it involves … impulses, or visionary representations, has prevailed in all ages and all nations…..  [The] Second Sight of the Hebrides implies only the local frequency of a power, which is nowhere totally unknown; and that where we are unable to decide by antecedent reason, we must be content to yield to the force of testimony.

Additional testimony from beyond the horizon of modernity and the edge of history can be found in old records.  In Leakey’s Bookshop in Inverness, I happened upon William MacKay’s Notes on Highland Superstitions (Nov. 12, 1885) in Volume III of Transactions of the Inverness Scientific Society and Field Club. MacKay reviewed Scottish records dating from as early as the year 1655 to show how Christians vigorously stamped out practices like the offering of oblations of milk upon the hills, fire worship amidst fields of kale, and “adoration of the holy wells.”  These pre-Christian practices were the products of the experiences of a people who from time immemorial had belonged to the land, engaged in simple routines that allowed for a good deal of silence and opportunity for subtler aspects of the world to be noticed and known.   

Woman carrying peat on the island of North Uist

On Leakey’s Bookshop shelves was also an old copy of Alexander MacKenzie’s The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer, first published in 1877 in the City of Inverness.  This book collected very specific predictions preserved from the 17th Century of a Highlands prophet and peat-digger with a particularly large third-eye. Many predictions came true.  Others did not. The seer’s Gaelic name was Coinneach Odhar, which in English means “dun-colored Kenneth.”  He foretold his nation’s loss of Second Sight: “the people will degenerate as their country improves.”

Contemporary monument to Coinneach Odhar, the Brahan Seer.

Through subsequent centuries, some in Scotland have retained a Second Sight or continued to cultivate it. This was one of the purposes of Freemasonry (which originated in Scotland) and affiliated occult groups like the Rosicrucians.  The Scottish poet Henry Adamson wrote of this in 1638:

For what we do presage is not in grosse,

For we are brethren of the Rosie Crosse;

We have the Mason Word and second sight,

Things for to come we can foretell aright.

The masonic Scottish Rite and a UK-originated Rosicrucian order were the main lineages to which Dr. Alberto Garcia was a student from approximately 1922 to 1962 while he lived in Austin Texas. 

In the Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia, I document how some of the more recent scientific knowledge and research relating to human consciousness has confirmed the fact of Second Sight and provided plausible scientific explanations for these phenomena.  There are reasons why Second Sight may not be a breach of the common order of things.

Why did Second Sight Wear Away?

What was going on in Scotland in the years before and after 1774 that would cause the spontaneous and vivid experiences of Second Sight to be diminishing?  Two interrelated factors, perhaps. 

Second Sight was condemned by an encroaching Christian church and state, who defined such awareness and ability as demonic, a form of witchcraft. The law, where the English-speaking world of Scotland or England had jurisdiction, began in 1542 to forbid witchcraft and to torture and burn witches.  The great jurist Edward Coke drafted the 1604 Witchcraft Act which imposed the death penalty on those who communed with fairies and other spirits and powers.  By 1775, witches were no longer burned at the stake, but “magical” powers were condemned by the clergy and it was still a crime to admit to them. 

A second factor in the decline of the faculty of Second Sight, was the mass uprooting of people from their lands and ways of life of long silences and ancient rhythms. The capitalist market imposed itself and came to define relationships among people that replaced the duthchas and other feudal relationships that bound everyone to the land, and had provided a commons and subsistence to all.  About this, Karl Marx wrote: “for the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself.” A relationship with nature characterized by oblations of milk upon the hills, fire worship amidst fields of kale, and “adoration of the holy wells” was disrupted and the earth’s surface transformed into parceled commodities. Nature became an instrumentality of capital, a thing—parceled by metes and bounds and allocated to those handful with the means and willingness to most ruthlessly and profitably exploit it as owners. 

A poem of the era singled out prominent land surveyor John Roy and estate manager Patrick Sellar:

Sellar and Roy were guided by the very devil,

when they commanded that the compass

and the chain be set to measure the land.

I saw a dream,

and I would not mind seeing it again,

if I were to see it while awake,

it would make me merry all day.

A big fire was ready

and Roy was right in the middle,

… and there was iron about Sellar’s bones.

Roy divided the land into parcels suitable for serving capital and Sellar carryied out evictions so violent that one earned him a charge of homicide. Mass evictions, and other elements of the Highland Clearances, sent dispossessed Highlanders to urban slums to adapt to the schedules and sensibilities of the capitalist industrial revolution

“Before 1760 there were few completely landless people in the Scottish countryside,” according to historian T.M. Devine.  But it “by 1830 had become a different kind of society.”  Social transformation in the Gaeldom of the Western Highlands “was more traumatic and cataclysmic than anywhere else in Scotland.  The Highlands moved from tribalism to capitalism in less than two generations.”  Whole communities were cleared and replaced with sheep. 

Portrait of Scots being removed from their feudal homes during the Clearances.

The island of N. Uist as it looks now after the Clearance.

Karl Marx wrote about this in his book Capital, and used it as a paradigmatic example of “primitive capital accumulation,” the process by which fundamental resources from which people create their livelihood are taken from them and appropriated and used to create the wealth of capital. Marx called primitive capital accumulation the “original sin” of the capitalist political economy, the pillaged source of all capital. Highlanders dispossessed of their land and other resources joined the massive labor reserves of industrial capitalism, their labor transformed into a commodity in the service of the owners of capital.  Many migrated to the slums of cities.  Glasgow harbored the largest and most impoverished slums of Europe.

Glasgow slums

Other dislocated islanders took overseas jobs within the British Empire or migrated to Canada or the United States to occupy lands dispossessed from Native Americans by the primitive capital accumulation carried out by the British Empire in the Western Hemisphere.

Marx identified the condition created from this dispossession as one of alienation.   

Diana Gabaldon

The contemporary world’s most significant popularizer of Scotland is the novelist and screenwriter Diana Gabaldon.  Her Outlander novels and television series are the product, among other things, of an immense amount of historical research.  Before becoming a fiction writer, Gabaldon was a scientist with a bachelor’s degree in zoology, a master’s degree in marine biology and a Ph.D. in behavioral ecology.  In February of 2021, I had the opportunity to ask this brilliant woman about Second Sight and the observations made by Dr. Samuel Johnson.  The occasion was a Zoom event sponsored by the San Miguel de Allende International Writers Conference.

Diana Gabaldon, as I expected, was familiar with Dr. Johnson’s writing on the subject.  I asked her, in light of her background as a scientist and her knowledge of Scotland, whether she thought the Scottish Highlanders were putting one over on Dr. Johnson or were suffering from some sort of delusion regarding Second Sight— or whether Dr. Johnson was reporting a real phenomenon. She responded that this is a real “thing” that is very much still alive in Scotland.  She mentioned an experience of being hosted in a castle in Scotland by a very successful and wealthy man who in all sincerity warned her about the ghost there that he and others had seen.

Second Sight in contemporary Scotland was the subject of research by Shari Ann Cohn at the University of Edinburg in 1996. Her surveys showed that 16% of the people in the Highlands said they have experienced Second Sight, a claim made by as many as 33% in the northeast Grampian area of Scotland. But only 10% in the cleared islands of North and South Uist still claimed to have experienced the gift of Second Sight.

Halloween celebrated in the Highlands, early 20th Century.

Second Sight of My MacDonald Grandmother

During my Parkhill visit, while I was sitting in a comfortable chair in my grandmother’s home in Ontario, reading R.D. Laing’s Politics of Experience, I knew my grandmother’s parents were MacDonalds and were Scottish.  I loved the opportunity to hear bagpipes played at social gatherings.  But at the time I had no idea that Laing himself was a Scotsman born in Glasgow. 

Only recently did I learn that my grandmother’s mother Flora MacDonald also was born in Glasgow, born of parents from the very islands Dr. Johnson visited 100 years earlier.   Flora’s father Donald MacDonald was born on the Outer Hebrides island of North Uist to a family of farmers.  He perhaps was among the 1,300 people removed from their homes in North Uist during 1838 and 1843 to be replaced by sheep. He came to Glasgow to sell his labor as a joiner. His wife, from the Island of Skye, became in Glasgow a servant in homes of the better off.  They left Glasgow with their daughter, my great grandmother Flora, for Canada. 

Ontario, Canada, however, did not offer complete relief from privation and tragedy. My grandmother’s father (like her mother, a MacDonald) one Sunday in 1907 put on his suit, went out the barn and shot himself dead.  He had been suffering from incurable cancer.  Faced with poverty, my grandmother Katherine MacDonald was sent away as a child to relatives, who beat her and treated her with exploitive cruelty.   

My grandmother Katherine MacDonald on the upper left with her siblings on their Ontario farm. As the oldest child in a family without a father, she assumed many responsibilities for her siblings.

Katherine eventually returned to her mother’s farm to help care for her siblings.  Due to her own perseverance she went to school, became a nurse, and traveled to the United States to care for patients during the great flu pandemic that followed World War I.  In Illinois she met my grandfather Louis Rockwell, a lawyer from the small picturesque town of St. Charles.  They married and she gave birth to my father. 

Contemporary photo of the St. Charles, Illinois, home of Louis Rockwell and Katherine MacDonald Rockwell, where my father grew up. During the Great Depression, hobos left marks on these trees, alerting others that my grandmother was a soft touch for those in need of food.

A well-documented family story gives testimony that while the Scottish Second Sight diminished, vestiges have survived the centuries of persecutions and Clearances. 

During World War II, my father Frank joined the Navy and served in a unit called Argus 11, which was embedded within the Marines.  As a radioman he provided morse code communication from Guadalcanal and other Solomon Island battlefields in the South Pacific.  Unbeknown to his family back home in Illinois, he was part of a force that invaded the island of Rendova at the end of June, 1943.  Back home, upon going to sleep on or around July 1, my grandmother had a horrible dream.  She could see bombs blowing up around my father and see a piece of shrapnel pierce his back.  Frank was hit!  She woke up in fright and anguish from this unusually vivid dream, and told her husband and daughter Anne about it.  She also wrote it down.

In due time my grandmother received a telegram confirming the accuracy of her dream, and telling her that her son was OK.  More details came later.  Around the time of that dream, at 1:30 pm July 2, Solomon Island Time, my father’s unit was among the U.S. forces hit by 50 to 60 bombs that were dropped with unusual accuracy by Japanese Ki-21 Mitsubishi bombers. Hearing the bombs falling, my father leaped out of his cot.  As he ran towards a trench filled with rainwater, his cot was demolished by a bomb.  A large piece of shrapnel blew into this back.  All this reverberated in the heart of Frank’s mother, sleeping 7750 miles away, on the other side of the earth. 

 

Mud-covered casualty of July 2 Rendova air raid.
My father’s purple heart medal from the raid. He lost this medal at some point. I had never seen it. But in writing this blog, when I did a search of images for Rendova and his Argus unit, this is the only responsive image that showed up. The medal is now apparently in the custody of a war memoralbilia collector.
My father, lower right, with friends at Green Island in 1944. My father’s good friend Bobby Webber (kneeling next to my father) and 83 others were also wounded in the July 2, 1943 air raid.  My father was evacuated from the island to receive medical treatment.  He returned to service for the invasion of the island of Munda.

Epilogue

Other unnumbered accounts of 20th Century Second Sight exist of mothers during World War II who have seen the precise circumstances of death of their sons as they occurred thousands of miles away. At least one of these remembrances can be found in other blogs on Scottish Second Sight.

Within days of circulating my Scottish Second Site blog to a neighbor of mine named John, he approached me to tell me his own family story. John grew up in Somerset, England at a time when England was besieged by bombing raids and rocket attacks from Hitler’s Germany. John’s much-older brother was in the Royal Air Force. When John was the age of four, he remembers his mother reporting an unusually disturbing dream. She had seen his brother being shot down in his plane and fall into the Mediterranean where he died. Word soon arrived that this is tragedy had indeed occurred exactly as dreamed by John’s mother.

John describes his mother as being very much of the land. She and her ancestors lived on farms maintaining the life and ways of the primeval English countryside.

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia: Physician, Mexican Revolutionary, Texas Journalist, Yogi (2020); R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (1967); Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Hebrides (1825 ed.); Alexander MacKenzie, The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer (1977 ed.); William MacKay, Notes on Highland Superstitions (Nov. 12, 1885) in Transactions of the Inverness Scientific Society and Field Club (Vol. III); Henry Adamson, The Muses’ Threnodie; Karl Marx, Capital (abridged ed. 2008, transl. David McLellan); Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1977); T.M. Devine, The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed 1600-1900 (2018); Argus Unit 11, United States Navy Argus Historical Group=argus1-12/argus-unit-2/; Alfred Weinzierl, Ki-21 Sallys Attack Munda and Rendova, Pacific Wrecks, http://www.pacificwrecks.com/japanese/munda.html; Eric Hammel, Munda Trail (1989); S. A. Cohn, A Survey on Scottish Second Sight, The Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (1994, no. 835). Additional contemporary accounts of Second Sight are found in a blog called Second Sight among the Scots Irish in the McCain’s corner website and the comments to that blog (July 17, 2015).

Thanks to my sister Sarah for contributing her memories and checking mine, as well as providing some background research on family experiences with Second Sight.

AMERICAN FASCISM and ANTIFA

by

PART II

Fascism has reared up in Austin, Texas, and throughout the US as a powerful force.  What occurred in January 6, 2021 was a fascist attempted autogolpe.  Lessons from the anti-fascism of Austin’s Dr. Alberto G. Garcia Antifa during the first half of the 20th Century provides insight as to how fascism grew and was successfully confronted in the US in the past. 

The Anti-fascism of Austin’s

Dr. Alberto G. Garcia

In Part I, I demonstrated how fascism and anti-fascism are part of our families and backgrounds as estadounidenses.  A disturbing family secret that I uncovered was that some of my in-laws in Illinois, as owners of The Texas Company, were powerful supporters of Hitler and fascism.  Promoting fascist governments in other countries has been a component of US foreign policy since 1919.   

While researching my biography of Austin’s first Mexican American physician, Alberto G. Garcia, I learned that he was an early and influential anti-fascist.  He fearlessly fought the proto-fascist Ku Klux Klan when it took over Austin in the early 1920s, and beginning in 1932 he strongly spoke out against international fascism and those in the US who supported it.  He was the head of the Austin branch of El Congreso, formed in 1938 to promote HIspanic civil rights and combat fascist organizing among Mexican Americans in the Southwest.  His and El Congreso’s accomplishments I recount in The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia.

Dr. Alberto G. Garcia with his family in 1922 (Austin History Center)

In my biography, I show Dr. Garcia creating and managing Austin’s first Spanish-language newspaper, La Vanguardia, where he documentated and denounced racist terror.  This was at a time when pro-Ku-Klux-Klan Southern Baptists had made inroads in the Mexican American community.  From their pulpits Baptist preachers issued proclamations like: “Above all else, Jesus Christ was a Klansman.”  The pastor of the Elgin, Texas, Baptist church collected tithings for the Ku Klux Klan.

By 1922, the Austin Klan members controlled key aspects of city and county government and held meetings at the East Fifth Street building where cotton export companies and the Austin Country Club had their offices.  Klan crosses were burned on Newning Avenue in South Austin, the street where Dr. Garcia and his family resided.  The rumored Grand Cyclops of the Austin Klan lived next door to Dr. Garcia.  Yet he was not intimidated by Klan violence.  He rescued Klan victims who had been tarred and feathered.

The Austin Klan was beaten back by: journalistic denunciations and exposure; prosecutions of Klan terrorists; an Austin judge who convened a grand jury investigation; pressure from the Mexican government; national advocacy by the NAACP; a bit of muscle used to clear the Klan from the streets; and public disgust.  Austin’s Shelton family produced three brave, anti-Klan lawyers.  To combat the Klan violence and intimidation, the Sheltons relied in part on the tough, poor, white community of cedar-choppers who lived on the edge of town in the rural hill country.  They were a law unto themselves and were adept at keeping government law enforcement out of their communities.  The Austin-area cedar choppers hated the Klan because they knew most of the Austin police were members.  My book recounts an incident where a Klan mob at the Travis County Courthouse was single-handedly dispersed by one cedar chopper named Buck Simpson, who happened to have been the most decorated U.S. soldier in World War I.

Ten years later fascism was rising in Europe and wherever there was fascism there were anti-fascist organizations.  In 1932, a German working-class organization formed as part of a social democrat, union and communist popular front first took on the name Antifa. That same year Dr. Garcia was very publicly outspoken in his opposition to the fascism that was rising in Europe and the United States.  Most in the US at this time were oblivious to the magnitude of the Nazi and fascist threat.

German Antifa in 1932. How many of these people survived Hitler’s violence and concentration camps?

In part 1 of this blog, I explain how a great uncle of mine and his niece and their company Texaco, supported fascism and gave vital assistance to Nazi Germany and General Franco in Spain.  They were not unique.  Within the US, men were organizing Silver Shirts, Khaki Shirts, the Black Legion, and other fascist and Nazi groups. 

Dr. Garcia wrote in the Dallas Morning News that fascism was the result of insecurity born of spiritual weakness: 

Fear of Bolshevism, Socialism and all radicalism that champions the underdog.  Fear of [non-white races.] American will be invincible and unafraid only when her spirit is purified.  Black shirts, brown shirts, night shirts and other shirts are merely the Fascist bundling of scattered terrors, and who harbors this terror, harbors it to his own destruction.

Right, justice, love—those alone can save the world.  Justice, right, and love alone inspire fearlessness and courage and insure life.

The DuPonts, Morgan bank interests, and other oligarchs formed the American Liberty League.   Irénée DuPont declared that the American Liberty League should include “all property owners … the American Legion and even the Ku Klux Klan.”   The Liberty League would become a component of a botched effort by the DuPonts and J.P. Morgan interests to foment a fascist coup against President Roosevelt.    Morgan Bank director Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy not only helped found the American Legion but had been decorated with the Italian Commander of the Crown by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.   In 1935, the National Vice-Commander of the American Legion traveled to Rome to pin a medal on Mussolini and declare him an honorary member of the American Legion.  Due to the support of DuPont, Morgan and other wealthy underwriters, the American Liberty League raised more money than the Democratic Party in 1935.  President Roosevelt called them out and was able to use public distaste for the oligarchs and their Liberty League to gain voters.

Dr. Garcia not only denounced fascism but as with the KKK called attention to the religious or spiritual underpinnings of fascism.  He called out the Catholic Church and others who were complicit in fascism’s growth.  The floor of the Cathedral of Tampico in Mexico was inlayed with Swastikas. 

Catholic clergy with fascist dictator Franco and his paramililitary blue shirts.
Swatikas in floor of Tampico Cathedral.

A fascist group in Mexico called the Sinarquistas was initiated and funded by German Nazis and Spanish and Italian fascists in 1937.  Sinarquistas attacked democracy as a “Judeomasonic plot” and defended the Catholic Inquisition.  They gained many adherents in Mexico but were outnumbered by the union members, intellectuals, and government officials who were strongly anti-fascist.  Mexico moreover enjoyed a good relationship with President Roosevelt.  The Sinarquistas began promoting fascism in the Mexican American communities in the United States, sometimes with the help of local Catholic churches.  A broad coalition of US Hispanic groups (including unions, church groups, liberals, socialists and communists) was formed beginning in 1938 to combat this fascism and to promote human rights.  The name of this group was the National Congress of Spanish-Speaking People and was referred to as El Congreso.   In Texas and California streets, dance halls, bars, and other social spaces, El Congreso members confronted the Sinarquistas and denied them venues in which to organize.  Guatemalan American union organizer Luisa Morena toured Texas to organize chapters.  She convinced Dr. Garcia to head the Austin chapter of El Congreso.  The Emmanuel Methodist Church on East Avenue where Dr. Garcia and his wife Eva were officers aided in the formation of a small local of an international union which had been a member of El Congreso. 

Members of the Austin local of the CTM, an El Congreso-affiliated union, formed with the help of Eva and Alberto Garcia’s Emmanuel Methodist Church. (Austin History Denter)
Mexican CTM union in the Mexico City Zocalo, denouncing the Sinarquistas.

US police considered El Congreso to be their enemy.  They spied on El Congreso but El Congreso was committing no crimes.   El Congreso was targeted by vigilante violence from which the police provided little protection.  In San Antonio, the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, the Baptist Church and others formed a mob outside the Municipal Auditorium where local El Congreso labor leader Emma Tenayuca was scheduled to speak.  The mob burned an effigy of Mayor Maury Maverick (an El Congreso supporter), threw bricks through the windows, entered the building, and forced Tenayuca to flee the building and her home in Texas. 

Mob storming the San Antonio Municipal Auditorium to shut down meeting featuring El Congreso labor leader Emma Tenayuca in 1939.  (UTSA library collection)
Luisa Moreno, the Guatemalan American leader of El Congreso.

The scourge of fascism in Europe was put down by resort to the violence of war.  Three of Dr. Garcia’s children joined the US military to wage war against fascism.  Two sons liberated a concentration camp in Germany.  A daughter piloted military transport planes and worked as an anesthesiological nurse, evacuating soldiers from various theaters of World War II. 

Dr. Garcia and his family in 1941, on the eve of World War II. Pilot and nurse Maria, back row far left, joined the Air Force where she flew transport planes and attended to injured soldiers being evacuated from Africa and India. Second from her left, John, served in General Patton’s army as did his brother Ronnie standing to his left.

The January 6, 2021 Coup Attempt: Fascism in Contemporary America

January 6, 2021 was the culmination of an attempted coup, or more precisely an autogolpe, to kidnap and possibly murder members of the United States Congress and prevent an elected president from taking office.  The leader of this operation, outgoing President Donald Trump, was a notorious non-reader of books; but one book he kept by his bedside long before he was elected was a collection of speeches by Adolph Hitler.   This botched January 6 autogolpe is analogous to the failed beer hall putsch sloppily executed by Adolph Hitler in Germany in 1922.  The German authorities and the world failed to take Hitler seriously.  Hitler was given a short sentence and released after serving less than a year in prison.  If Hitler had been imprisoned for 20 years, World War II would not have happened. 

As with Nazi Germany, fascist efforts in the US are supported by some of the wealthiest people in America.  Oligarchic money has poured into the Republican Party which has become a party of fascism—a party that has not only been supporting the nullification of a national election that kicked President Trump out of office but a party that holds its affiliate CPAC convention on a stage in the shape of an Odal rune, a symbol worn by German Nazi SS member and venerated by US neo-Nazis.  Billionaire hedge fund owner Robert Mercer and his daughter have put an enormous amount of funds into fascist organizations and candidates, including the right-wing social network Parlor and Cambridge Analytica.  Mercer also owns Centre Firearms, a company that claims to “own the nation’s largest private cache of machine guns.”  The rally that urged Trump supporters to take the Capitol and block Biden’s ability to take office was largely funded by Julie Jenkins Fancelli, an heiress to the Publix Super Markets Inc.  In this she was working with Austin’s right-wing media personality Alex Jones. 

Alex Jones rides a military vehicle to an anti-mask rally at the Texas Capitol in 2020.

The activities of Donald Trump were financed to the tune of $90 million dollars by Sheldon Adelson, the chairman, and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Casino.  Adelson also financed the Republican Attorney Generals Association (RAGA) which sent robocalls ahead of the January 6 event encouraging Trump supporters to march on the Capitol.   Koch Industries have been huge supporters of RAGA and of politicians who have taken the position that Biden should not be allowed to take office because the election was stolen.   

Part 1 of this blog post used Austin as an example to show that police and law enforcement offer protection against fascists that is unreliable at best.  Commonly police forces support fascist groups and their goals, as do elements of the military.  Many of those participating in the assault on Congress were police officers.  The head of the Proud Boys group that helped lead the attack, Enrique Tarrio, was a longtime informant for federal and local law enforcement.  He was arrested for possessing illegal weapons in Washington DC, a couple days before the attack on Congress.  The head of the Chicago police union publicly expressed sympathy for the attackers.  De-funding and reforming police departments would appear to be essential steps in blocking the rise of fascism.  Austin, Texas, has moved in this direction as a result of a grassroots campaign after repeated abuses by the police department. 

Militaries often have supported fascist movements.  Hitler was working for German military intelligence when he was ordered to infiltrate the small German Nazi Party.   Thomas Caldwell, who was arrested and accused of being a leader of the Oath Keepers fascist group and leading them in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, is also a consultant for the US government who holds a top-secret security clearance.  Caldwell previously worked as a section chief for the FBI from 2009 to 2010 after retiring from the Navy, where he handled top secret security measures beginning in 1979.  After the January 6 attack, the Pentagon acknowledged the presence of fascist white supremacists among its ranks.  The Pentagon report did not give percentages, because it does not know, but it gave examples, such as the co-founder of a neo-Nazi group called Atomwaffen Division who has “bragged about sharing his white supremacist views while in the military.” 

After he lost the election, President Trump in November appointed Brigadier General Anthony Tata as the Pentagon’s Acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy.  Tata had been a Fox News regular who referred to former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader.”   Trump also appointed as Acting Secretary of Defense, a military special operations soldier with CIA connections named Christopher Miller.  The US military has acknowledged that operatives like Miller engage in psy-ops and unconventional warfare “to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government … by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force….”  Former three-star general and former Director of National Security for Trump Michael Flynn openly called for Trump to impose martial law and nullify the election of Joe Biden.  Alarmed, all ten living former defense secretaries in a January 3, 2021 signed an open letter, stating their opposition to a military coup overturning the election results, and warning officials who would participate and specifically naming Miller, that they would face grave consequences if they violated the constitution.

An attempted coup did happen three days later on January 6 and Christopher Miller indeed did play an essential role in assisting it.  The main reason the coup almost succeeded was that the Capitol was left undefended from a mob that included violent fascists who were answering the call to stop Congress’s certification of the election results. Even in a peaceful demonstration by left groups, there as a matter of course would be a significant well-equipped national guard, police and military presence. There are reasons that the Capitol was left undefended on January 6. Two days beforehand, Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller issued memos prohibiting the deployment of D.C. Guard members with weapons, helmets, body armor or riot control agents without his personal approval. On January 5, Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy issued a memo placing additional limits on the District of Columbia National Guard. Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the DC National Guard, later explained: “All military commanders normally have immediate response authority to protect property, life, and in my case, federal functions. But in this instance, I did not have that authority.”  Miller and McCarthy directly caused a delay of three hours after the Capitol was breached, allowing the insurrectionists to come within minutes of kidnapping and murdering members of Congress.  In the Pentagon room while Secretaries Miller and McCarthy were delaying the delivery of protection to Congress members in the Capitol building, was the brother of Michael Flynn, Lt. General Charles Flynn. 

President Trump’s Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller. The photo was taken while Miller was serving in the Special Forces in Afghanistan.

Protection of the American public against the further growth of fascism through coups or other military actions require full investigations of Christopher Miller, Ryan McCarthy, Lt. General Charles Flynn, Anthony Tata and other high-ranking military officials.  Those involved in planning or aiding and abetting the attempted coup need to be criminally prosecuted.  This includes elected officials within the Republican Party.  White supremacists and other fascists need to be removed from the military.  And the military needs to be downsized and restricted. 

Solutions

Fascism is a form of class war.  Fascism is funded by the wealthy and finds support within the middle class.  Forty percent of the Capitol insurrectionists arrested since January 6 are business owners or hold professional jobs.  The power of the oligarchs, professionals, and business owners must be counterbalanced by democratic anti-racist working-class organizations that are wholly independent of wealthy oligarchic interests and funding.  This would include unions.   Dr. Garcia was involved in these kinds of efforts.  Unions and Antifa groups like El Congreso helped prevent the spread of fascism within the United States. 

Coalition work with a broad group of organizations (conservative, liberal, and Left) against fascism is necessary.  Dr. Garcia promoted labor unions and was not afraid to work with communists and the Austin Chamber of Commerce to secure his democratic and civil rights goals.  Reporter Molly Ball has documented how in 2019 a high-level political strategist for the large AFL-CIO union foresaw that Trump would refuse to concede an election if he was the loser.  The union strategist assembled a large coalition of liberal left groups and reached out to conservative anti-fascists to create an ambitious behind-the-scenes effort ensure that the election would run in a way that could not effectively be undermined by Trump.   In 2020, the US Chamber of Commerce joined and financed these efforts in the belief that Trump-inspired disruption of the election would be bad for business.  This broad coalition did essential work to ensure the integrity of the 2020 election so that the results of the election could not be questioned by the right or the left.  But, as history has shown, the US Chamber of Commerce cannot be counted on to be an enemy of fascism.  It is not so clear that the Chamber of Commerce would have actively opposed Trump’s autogolpe if Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic Party nominee and election victor.

History has demonstrated that grassroots mobilization against fascism is vital where fascists are active.  Fascists need to be denied venues with which to organize, to intimidate people, and to display and perpetuate their violent, oppressive, and racist relationships.   This was also a primary strategy used by anarchist groups in the 1980s to stop neo-Nazi influence over the youth subcultures in Texas and elsewhere.  It was also used by El Congreso. 

Some of the origins of fascism arise out of fundamental values and components of US society.  Trump’s Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller had openly stated that the role of the US military is to maintain an “American dominance in the world that allows Americans to enjoy what it is we love in our society….  Americans will not happily accept a decline in our standard of living so that others elsewhere can have more.”  This is the perpetuation of wealth disparity laid out as the central goal of the US State Department and military in the secret but influential State Department 1948 memo PPS/23.   

As far back as 1921, Dr. Alberto G. Garcia, writing in Austin, Texas, warned of the corroding effect on the United States of this imperialism.  He prophesied on the pages of his newspaper:

[W]e see American magnates interested in monopolizing oil, the trade of countries that have undeveloped industries, etc.  And, when they do not achieve this by peaceful means, they seek the political and military intervention of the United States to accomplish their ends.  This is the origin of imperialism.  Imperialism offers vision of the military expansion of the country that covers all the Americas and the entire world.  It offers powers, riches, glories, submissions from other nations and races.  And in the soul of some, the illusion overwhelms the love of freedom, paralyzing the current that has always given force and virility to this country. 

When the majority of the American citizens let themselves be dominated by this idea of military expansion, the decadence will begin, because the reason to be for the American nation will be dead.    

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia: physician, Mexican revolutionary, Texas journalist, yogi (2020); Brad Rockwell, unfinished manuscript history of Texaco; James Stout, A Brief History of Anti-Fascism, Smithsonian Magazine (June 24, 2020); Nigel Copsey, Militant Antifascism: An Alternative (Historical) Reading, Society (May 2018);  Michael J. Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth (2018); Alexander Reid Ross, Against the Fascist Creep (2017); Stanislav Vysotsky, American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism (2021); Scott Crow, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective (2011); Chauncey DeVega, CPAC veers into neo-Nazi fantasy: Was it deliberate? That hardly matters, Salon (March 2, 2021); Alanna Durkin Richer & Michael Balsamo, Navy vet, FBI section chief charged in US Capitol riot, Radio.com (Feb. 9, 2021); Ellie Kaufman & Oren Liebermann, Pentagon report reveals disturbing details about White supremacists in the ranks, CNN (February 25, 2021); Jeremy Kuzmarov, Will New Pentagon Chief Use Psyops to Save His Boss?, Covert Action Magazine (Nov. 11, 2020); Col. Ty Connett & Col. Bob Cassidy, Village Stability Operations: More than Village Defense, Special Warfare Magazine (US Army JFK Special Warfare Center and School, July-September 2011); Alex Deep, Village Stability Operations and the Application of Special Warfare Across the Contemporary Global Operating Environment, Small Wars Journal (April 7, 2014);      Ashton Carter, All 10 living former defense secretaries: Involving the military in election disputes would cross into dangerous territory, The Washington Post  (January 3, 2021);     Luke Broadwater & Michael S. Schmidt, Officials Put ‘Unusual’ Limits on D.C. National Guard Before Riot, Commander Says, New York Times (March 3, 2021); Paul Sonne, Pentagon restricted commander of D.C. Guard ahead of Capitol riot, Washington Post (Jan. 26, 2021); Dan Lamothe, Paul Sonne, Carol D. Leonnig &  Aaron C. Davis, Army falsely denied Flynn’s brother was involved in key part of military response to Capitol riot, Washington Post (Jan. 20, 2021); Igor Derysh, How one billionaire family bankrolled election lies, white nationalism — and the Capitol riot, Salon (Feb. 4, 2021); Robert Pape & Keven Ruby, The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists, The Atlantic (Feb. 2, 2021); Shalini Ramachandran, Alexandra Berzon & Rebecca Ballhaus, Jan. 6 Rally Funded by Top Trump Donor, Helped by Alex Jones, Organizers Say, Wall Street Journal (Feb. 1, 2021); Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, Follow the Money Behind the Capitol Riot, Brennan Center for Justice (Jan. 25, 2021); Brendan O’Conner, The Capitol riot wasn’t a fringe ‘uprising’. It was enabled by very deep pockets, The Guardian (February 18, 2021); Molly Ball, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, Time (Feb. 4, 2021). 

AMERICAN FASCISM and ANTIFA Part I

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Contemporary Fascists in Austin, Texas, and the Deadly 20th Century Fascism supported by some of my relatives through The Texas Company

On a Saturday afternoon in or around 2012 at the SxSW international music festival, I was with my nephew on a closed downtown street.  We looked up and were startled to see coming down the street towards us a grim and silent group displaying an array of long guns, as well as a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.   Some were dressed partially in military camouflage.  In this festive urban environment full of revelers from around the world in jeans, shorts, and t-shirts, the camouflage served to highlight rather than hide the marchers’ military purpose.  

The complete lack of visible police presence was notable.  I had participated in many protest marches, some even during SxSW—and there was always a significant police presence. Occasionally the police would arrest or attack protesters.  During the annual state high school track and field competitions, which drew a large number of African-Americans from around Texas, the police presence was draconian, as if they were preparing for an invasion.  But on that Saturday afternoon, not a single member of the police force was to be seen near this armed group resembling some of those who would in 2021 march on the US Capitol to try to attack and kidnap members of Congress.   

This armed military display at SxSW seems to have been a spectral harbinger, a soundless dirge amidst the loud music. 

Right-wing Violence and Intimidation Escalates in Austin

Since then, armed right-wing groups made their presence increasingly known in Austin, targeting people on the Left, as well as the black and brown communities in East Austin.  They attacked and beat-up marchers celebrating May Day.  They occupied a park in East Austin, and intimidated others from using it to distribute free food.  

Armed fascists showed up to support the gentrification of East Austin, at a time when the gentrification process there was the most intense in the country. One morning in 2015, Sergio Lajarazu recounted, “I was driving by like any other day, taking my daughter to school. That’s when I saw it: my life’s work under the bulldozer.” His landlord, without warning and in the middle of a lease, bulldozed Sergio and his wife’s Jumpolin piñata shop.  The Mexican American tenants apparently were an obstacle to Austin developers’ displacement of Mexican Americans from their affordable homes and leases. The landlord characterized his actions as a form of beautification, comparing it to a clearing away an infestation of “roaches.”

The quick demolition of Jumplin by the landlord.

In subsequent months, I joined demonstrators organized by Defend Our Hoodz and others on the sidewalk outside to protest the Blue Cat Cafe business brought in by the landlord to replace the piñata shop. 

One of many protests and pickets outside of Blue Cat Cafe. The camera caught me in the back unwittingly holding my sign upside down.

The neighborhood continued to picket the cat café.  Paul Gray, the brother of the owner of the Blue Cat Café, was a military veteran and member of the Neo-Nazi military group called Vanguard America; he soon would join an offshoot called Patriot Front. Gray brought his friends and was joined by others recruited by local media rageaholic Alex Jones to confront the anti-gentrification protestors.  These military-trained fascists intimidated and assaulted anti-gentrification protestors.  The police tasered an anti-gentrification protestor and seemed to offer little protection from the fascists who were trying to disrupt these regular demonstrations.  

Paul Gray

The Patriotic Front apparently are book burners too.  In November of 2017, the Patriot Front showed up in front of Monkeywrench bookstore in Austin, a gathering place for leftists and known for hosting Marxist intellectuals like Gayatri Spivak, activists from El Salvador, and brave young Dalit women from India. 

An Antifa Response

While police did little to protect people from fascists, anti-fascists took action to make it clear fascists were not welcome in Austin.  Neo-Nazis and their local employers were identified.  People were encouraged to call the businesses giving employment to fascists and as a result it appears that some were fired. 

Around the time Paul Gray showed up at the Blue Cat Café, he scheduled a neo-Nazi rally at the Texas Capitol.  He described it as an effort to support “Gov. Abbott’s and Pres. Trump’s policy on enforcing border protection, helping the Border Patrol and police forces in their service, and all our Texas congressmen who want to put America first.”  Antifa groups sounded the alarm and I answered the call to surround the neo-Nazis with the counter-protestors.  We outnumbered the fascists, made a lot of noise, and made sure their rally was frustrated. 

A small gathering of Vanguard America and other fascists at the Texas Capitol on June 17, 2017. Organized by Paul Gray.
Antifa participants surrounded the fascists and drowned them out.

Within a few months, neo-Nazi demonstrations organized by Paul Gray’s group Vanguard America occurred in Charlottesville Virginia, where one of the white supremacists drove his car into a crowd of anti-racist counter-protestors, killing one of them. 

Police, Military, Fascist and Corporate Cooperation

A massive hack of regional police data sharing centers in July of 2020 demonstrated police collusion with corporate and right-wing violence.  This hack, which included the Austin Regional Intelligence Center, revealed that the police were targeting Muslims, American anti-fascists, and people lawfully protesting police violence. The police were defining these kinds of people as terroristic threats.  Right-wing domestic terrorists were largely ignored as threats.  In some respects, the fascists were considered allies.  A black anti-police-violence protestor in Dallas was arrested and placed in jail for five months before the charges were dropped; the basis for his arrest had been a video prepared by Alex Jones’ Infowars.

The hack showed that the police cultivated a secret network of citizen informants from churches, security agencies, and other sources, reminiscent of the actions of the FBI in the 1940s and 50s when they enlisted 100,800 members of the American Legion at 16,700 posts to spy on left-wing Americans in their own communities. Documents from the police regional surveillance centers show an interest in bizarre conspiracies favored by the right such as so-called efforts to install Sharia law in the US.  The hack revealed the close allegiance between the nation’s police and big oil companies and big banks like Chase Bank.  Targets of “anti-terrorist” police surveillance in Austin included anti-fossil fuel activists.  

When the Austin police killed Mike Ramos, the Mike Ramos Brigade was formed. The Brigde and many others organized large demonstrations downtown and near the police station in 2020.  At one large demonstration at the police station, police casually fired many rounds of so-called “non-lethal” projectiles into the anti-police-violence protestors, causing permanent brain damage to one protestor and permanent loss of an eye by another.  Dozens suffered less serious injuries. Right-wing extremists with guns showed up to support the police.  A few of the protestors against police violence also carried weapons to protect themselves. 

 

During one march on Congress Avenue, within a few feet of some of my friends who were there, a military sergeant arrived in a car, seemingly intent on repeating the murder and mayhem from Charlottesville.  He drove up to the march, stopped, and then accelerated his car directly into the crowd, holding his steering wheel with one hand and a pistol in the other.  When protestors approached the car to try to stop it, the driver quickly shot into the crowd, killing protestor Garrett Foster. 

The driver turned himself in to police who briefly interrogated him and accepted and repeated to the public his lies about the incident.  The police released him within hours, without questioning any other eye-witnesses.  The police even hid the identity of the shooter from the public.  Activists were able to identify the killer as Sgt. Daniel Perry.  The elected head of the Austin police union made statements indicating that Daniel Perry gave Garrett Foster what he deserved; the police union blamed Foster’s death on the activists who opposed police violence. According to the police union head: Garrett Foster “was looking for confrontation and he found it. The Feux Mike Ramos Brigade needs to be stopped. The only people out of control during this incident was the Feux Brigade.”       

         

It was not surprising to me that violent right-wing fascist groups grew and become emboldened enough to stage a violent attack on the US Congress on January 6, 2021.  Paul Gray’s Patriot Front was there. So were the Proud Boys, although its leader, Enrique Terrio, was revealed to be a longtime police informant.  Members of local police forces as well as the US military participated in this insurrection. I was not surprised when the head of the Chicago police union, elected by its 12,000 members publicly defended the violent insurrectionists and expressed sympathy for them.  The insurrectionists were encouraged by President Trump and funded by oligarchs.  

With this act, finally these fascist groups who have been terrorizing people in Austin and many other parts of the country began to be recognized as the terroristic threat that they are.

Skeletons in My Family Closet: Oil Companies and Fascism

I do have a unique perspective on fascism and of the support that exists for fascism among US oligarchs.  More than ten years ago, I had opened a door to a family closet and found some skeletons, hidden away in the Fox River Valley of rural small-town Illinois where I grew up.  

In the 19th Century, my great aunt Harriet Rockwell of St. Charles, Illinois, had married grocery clerk Ed Baker who by a strange quirk of fate inherited in 1918 half of the John W. Gates fortune.   His niece, 15-year-old Dellora Angell, inherited the other half.  This surprise inheritance put them among the top .0001% of Americans in terms of wealth. When Dellora reached 19, she married Lester Norris, a St. Charles classmate from public school, who was trained as an illustrator. 

Newlyweds Dellora and Lester Norris.

Despite Ed Baker and the Norrises being a regular part of my father’s family gatherings when he was a child, I had never met them and knew little about them. I grew up on the other side of the tracks in a town near to their homes in St. Charles.  In the second decade of the 21st Century, I became curious and learned that the bulk of the Gates fortune inherited by these two was in shares of The Texas Company, known by its brand-name Texaco.  Ed and Dellora inherited enough Texaco shares to make Baker and the Norrises collectively the largest shareholders in the company.  I also learned that in 1927, Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini sat to have his portrait drawn by Lester Norris, a portrait that Norris kept on the wall of his office in St. Charles. 

Portrait of Benito Mussolini by Lester Norris

Lester Norris was elevated to the Board of Directors of Texaco in 1933 and served until 1973—making him the longest serving member of the Texaco Board.  During his tenure, my research revealed to me that Texaco had provided oil for Hitler’s navy, assisted Nazi espionage, and provided all the oil necessary on credit to General Franco to make his fascist coup in Spain a success. Texaco supported various fascist coups around the world.  Fascists have been installed in governments with the blessings of some of the most powerful people in the United States.

In my attempt to understand the phenomenon of Lester Norris and Texaco, of Dr. Alberto G. Garcia and his life, and of the recent eruption of an aggressive US domestic fascist movement, I have developed some understanding of how fascism comes about and what measures against fascism have been shown to be effective in the past. 

What is fascism?  Fascism is a type of political gangsterism leading to terroristic dictatorship where non-white racial groups and left-wing groups are scapegoated and persecuted to perpetuate a capitalist society.  Fascism is ultranationalist and relies on certain religious or quasi-religious doctrines to justify itself. It also relies on a fun-house mirror of appropriated left-wing rhetoric.  Fascism is what oligarchs support when they feel their privileges and power are threatened by liberal or left-wing democratic political movements.  Fascism can be appealing to middle classes whose status and prosperity are threatened when monopoly capitalism destroys small businesses.  For example, since the demise of the Farmers Alliance and the Peoples Party in the 19th Century, monopoly capitalism has forced off the land more than 60% of farm owners, and employed Walmart and other international franchises to destroy rural small businesses.  These rural areas are where Donald Trump has proven to be most popular. Most of the people facing charges from the Capitol insurrection had prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes.  “Resentment and revenge are fascism’s prime emotions,” according to historian Alexander Reid Ross.    

An early and continuous financial supporter of the German Nazi Party was Henry Ford.  Other US corporations and oligarchs over time provided funds and other forms of support to the German Nazis. 

The first fascist government was imposed on Hungary in 1919. Among those who helped bring about the Hungarian fascist coup was US intelligence operative Allen Dulles.  Dulles would go on to support Nazism as an international lawyer for major corporations and as an intelligence operative with the OSS. Later, after he became a top official and then director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, Dulles organized and supported fascistic coups in a number of countries.   In 1954, to give just one example, Dulles working with the oligarch Averell Harriman organized the overthrow of a secular social democratic government in Iran in order to protect the interests of US and British oil companies.  Dulles bankrolled and directed Iranian Nazi and fascist leaders, whose members had supported Hitler and Mussolini in World War II.  The new Iranian dictator imposed by Dulles was induced to retain Lester Norris’s man—the former Texaco Chairman Torkild Rieber—as his oil minister.  Although Rieber had been staunchly supported by Texaco director Lester Norris, the majority of other Texaco directors in 1940 forced him to resign when the press began to discover and report on Texaco’s assistance to Hitler.  Secular democracy has never returned to Iran.


Lester Norris’s man: Torkild Rieber, Chairman of the Boord of Texaco, on the cover of Time magazine.  After Hitler’s invasion of Poland had caused England and France to declare war on Germany, Rieber in 1939 traveled to Germany where he spent a weekend during the Christmas holidays with Hitler’s second-in-command Herman Goering at his hunting lodge.  Rieber had earlier agreed to provide Texaco oil to the German navy in exchange for Germans building tankers for Texaco.  In 1936, Rieber had offered to Spanish General Franco oil to fuel his fascist insurgency against the democratic government of Spain.  Texaco also provided a home in Scarsdale and an office in the Chrysler Building for a German spy who came to the US in 1940 to stoke sympathy and assistance to Hitler among the US elites.      .

Diego Rivera painting memorializing the overthrow of democratic government in Guatemala by the US.  CIA Director Allen Dulles is portrayed in dark suit with money pouch standing behind his brother Secretary of State John Foster Dulles who is shaking hands with the new dictator who is prepared to create a dictatorial banana republic favorable to United Fruit Company.  The Dulles brothers were both lawyers and United Fruit had been a long-time client.

Torkild Rieber’s wife either jumped or was pushed to her death from their home in a Manhattan penthouse during the height of Rieber’s infatuation with Hitler. By 1954, Rieber was happily ensconced in an office at the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. That year, Rieber hosted the daughter of the fascist dictator of Spain, Francisco Franco, flying her on his private jet from Washington to New York to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles where they were guests of honor at a party thrown by Hollywood mogul Jack Warner.

Rieber died in 1968, after Ed Baker but while Lester Norris was still on the Texaco Board. They are all dead now. Texaco owners Ed Baker, Dellora Norris and Lester Norris are entombed in the same St. Charles, Illinois cemetery where my father is buried. My great grandfather Henry Rockwell shares a large and spacious tomb with Ed Baker.

Fascism has long been deeply embedded in US society and government.  In part II of this blog post, I look back at the Antifa actions of Dr. Alberto G. Garcia of Austin and others.  In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Labor unions, a free press, and left-wing organizations were able to offer working class Americans alternatives to anti-democratic, fascist organizations and help position the national government to be anti-fascist.  Of course, it took war and enormous amounts of violence to defeat the fascism that had arisen in Europe with the essential help of German oligarchs like Kurt von Schroeder and Fritz Thyssen and US oligarchs like Henry Ford, the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, the House of Morgan, and my relatives at Texaco. 

In part II I also identify oligarchs who have supported the insurrection and attempted coup or autogolpe on January 6, and draw conclusions from history and experience as to what can be done to stop fascism in the United States.

Sources

Brad Rockwell, unfinished manuscript history of Texaco; Alexander Reid Ross, Against the Fascist Creep (2017); Michael J. Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth (2018); Stanislav Vysotsky, American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism (2021); Dustin Ray Hamby Exposed as Nazi Leader Chef Goyardee, blog of the Screwston Anti-fascist Committee (Sept. 20, 2019); Defend Our Hoodz, Facebook page; Centex Fascists, Autonomedia website; Shelley Seale, Conflicting stories surround controversial demolition of East Austin piñata store, Culture Map (February 15, 2015); Micah Lee, Hack of 251 Law Enforcement Websites Exposes Personal Data of 700,000 Cops, The Intercept (July 15, 2020); John Anderson, APD’s Secret Informants Eyeing Neighbors for “Suspicious” Activity, Leaked Documents Reveal; APD intel center puts spies among us, Austin Chronicle (July 24, 2020); John Anderson,  Austin Regional Intelligence Center’s Secret Informants Show How Profiling Works; “Middle Eastern”? Your info might be on file at Austin’s fusion center, Austin Chronicle (August 7, 2020); John Anderson, ARIC: Black Marchers With Guns? How the Huey P. Newton Gun Club got caught up in Austin Regional Intelligence Center’s snitching program, Austin Chronicle (Sept. 11, 2020); John Anderson, Local Activists Call Out Police and Find Themselves Flagged as Threats, Austin Chronicle (Aug. 28, 2020); Todd C. Frankel, A majority of the people arrested for Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble, Washington Post (Feb. 10, 2021); Carolyn Dimitri, Anne Effland, and Neilson Conklin, The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy, United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (2005).

Yui Sakamoto — another San Miguel de Allende Surrealist

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Pedro Friedeberg has been one of the first surrealists in San Miguel de Allende, but certainly not the last.

Yesterday Gallery Interseccion at Fabrica Aurora opened up a new show of painter Yui Sakamoto’s latest works. Here are some photos of the new paintings of this San Miguel de Allende artist.

Pedro Friedeberg

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Triptiko Triptiko Triptikstiko

A Surrealistic path from Austin to Mexico City to San Miguel de Allende.   

In The Life and Times of Alberto Garcia, I note Dr. Garcia’s probable contact and influence with University of Texas student Anita Brenner.  In my last blog post, I described how 17-year-old Anita Brenner’s experience with the occult, perhaps at the home of Dr. Alberto Garcia, caused her to leave the University in 1923, after her freshman year, and return to Mexico.  A voice at this séance predicted great things for her in Mexico, and with astounding swiftness the teenaged Brenner made friends with the artistic and political luminaries of the day.  Anita over the decades had an immense influence in making the world aware of Mexican art and in securing refuge for those persecuted for their race or their political beliefs.  

Mexico City architectural student Pedro Friedeberg during the 1950s worked for Anita Brenner’s magazine Mexico This Month. She encouraged him to quit architecture school and become an artist.  A few years later, in June of 1966, she featured him on the cover of Mexico This Month.   

The author of the world’s first surrealistic manifesto, André Breton, came to consider Pedro Friedeberg and Frida Kahlo the only two great surrealists in Mexico.  Only Pedro survives.

André Breton, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky. Pedro Friedeberg’s mother served as a translator for Trotsky while he lived in Mexico.

Pedro’s recent comments on architecture perhaps prove the sagacity of Anita Brenner’s career advice:

“I admire everything that is useless, frivolous and whimsical. I hate functionalism, post modernism and almost everything else. I do not agree with the dictum that houses are supposed to be ‘machines to live in’. For me, the house … is supposed to be some crazy place that makes you laugh.”

Architecture degree or not, Pedro Friedeberg in 1961 did design a lotus house for Edward James surrealist compound in the mountain jungles of eastern San Luis Potosi.  The roof was lotus-shaped because James instructed Friedeberg that the house “should close during the day because the sun is so hot, and at night it should open so you can see the stars.”

Lotus House designed by Pedro Friedeberg for Edward James

Pedro’s parents were Jews who fled fascism in Europe and arrived in Mexico in 1939.  “I was born in Italy during the era of Mussolini, who made all trains run on time. Immediately thereafter, I moved to México where the trains are never on time, but where once they start moving they pass pyramids.”

His mother was a leftist who loved glamour.  The gardens of Pedro’s family home in Mexico City were designed by the architect Luis Barragan.  He recollects: “At an early age I was influenced by theosophy, Catholicism, atheism, Eastern customs and religions.  I was always fascinated by religious architecture: cathedrals, Aztec pyramids, synagogues, Gurdjieffian temples, and so on.”  But now he claims no interest in religion.  “I’m not really mystical,” he says.

In 1959, Pedro got his first gallery show, at Galeria Diana in Mexico City.  Today, Galeria Casa Diana in the colonial town of San Miguel de Allende permanently has his art on display.  Before I was aware of Pedro’s prominence and history, I was a regular visitor to this small and beautiful gallery that used to be the residence of him and Diana.  It is next door to the entrance to the bull ring that dominates a block near the center of this old colonial town.  Coming from the street into the gallery, Spanish colonialism meets Mickey Mouse, 21st Century pyramids, and op art.  The space invites transformation.  A couple years ago, on the Day of the Dead, I went to the gallery to silently gaze in the eyes of strangers and to be taken blindfolded through a vocal musical improvisation—all organized by a young Burning Man impresario.

            This is how Pedro Friedeberg greeted me one time at his gallery. 

Pedro Friedeberg

I once brought Dr. Alberto Garcia’s granddaughter Kay to Galeria Casa Diana.  At the time, I was not aware that Anita Brenner had in 1923 been invited to Dr. Garcia’s parties for Mexican students at his home in the south Austin neighborhood of Travis Heights.  Nor was I aware of the personal prophecy given to Anita during a séance at the home of Dr. Garcia or some other Austin occultist.  And I was not aware of Brenner’s role in encouraging and promoting Friedeberg. 

Dr. Alberto G. Garcia’s granddaughter Kay at Galeria Casa Diana

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia: Physician, Mexican Revolutionary, Texas Journalist, Yogi (2020); Alan Grabinsky, 10,000 Hard-Boiled Eggs and the Art of Pedro Friedeberg At 82, the Mexican artist isn’t done collecting junk in his irrational house, Tablet Magazine (May 4, 2017); Pedro Friedeberg: Inventor of alternative realities (April 12, 2019), https://www.christies.com/features/In-conversation-with-Pedro-Friedeberg-8677-1.aspx; Philip Alvaré, Hands Down, Pedro Friedeberg’s Mexico City Home Is a Surrealist Delight\The eccentric artist’s abode is a veritable cabinet of curiosities, Introspective Magazine (February 16, 2020); Tessel M. Bauduin, Surrealism and the Occult (2014); Patrick Lepetit, The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism: Origins, Magic, and Secret Societies (2014); Laurinda S. Dixon, review of Guggenheim exhibition Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897, Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, Vol. 16 (Autumn 2017). 

Official website of Pedro Friedeberg:

Pedro Friedeberg

The Texas Séance that Transformed the Life of Anita Brenner

by

As a 17-year-old in the year 1922, Anita Brenner enrolled in the University of Texas.  Her experience of Austin had quite an impact on her and motivated her to return to Mexico, the country of her birth.  There, with renewed confidence and the mentorship of J. Frank Dobie, she immediately embarked on a broad range of activities that would quickly gain her international acclaim and influence.  Austin’s Dr. Alberto Garcia’s role in this has been briefly alluded to in my book The Life and Times of Dr. Alberto G. Garcia: physician, Mexican Revolutionary, Texas Journalist, Yogi.  Here I provide a fuller account of how Austin’s occultists, including perhaps Dr. Garcia, changed Ms. Brenner’s life. 

Childhood witness to the Mexican Revolution in Aguascalientes

As a child living in her birthplace of Aguascalientes, Mexico, Anita’s nanny, Nana Serapia, opened her eyes to the world of spirits and ghosts.  When Anita was five years old, the Mexican Revolution broke out following the celestial displays of Halley’s Comet and the Centennial Comet.  Anita remembers Nana telling her that these comets heralded terrible things to come. Under the leadership of the Spiritist and yogi Francisco Madero, however, the victory of the Mexican Revolution over the dictator Porfirio Diaz was swift.  The year after Halley’s Comet, when revolutionary leader Francisco Madero set foot in Mexico City as the newly-elected president, an earthquake shook the ground and put cracks in the National Palace which had been the headquarters of the tyrant Diaz.  Nana told Anita that this earthquake meant that a wicked era was over.  Madero participated in séances and engaged in a type of automatic writing; through these activities, spirits had predicted his unlikely ascendency to the presidency and also predicted his later downfall.

President Madero was assassinated less than two years after assuming office, by generals in league with the United States Ambassador.  The Mexican Revolution started back up again to oust a new dictatorship.  Anita’s childhood eyewitness accounts of the revolution as seen from her parents’ home in Aguascalientes were quite vivid.  Her father was a Jewish immigrant from Latvia and had been successful enough to own and operate a ranch.  Anita became an admirer of Pancho Villa after his army, the Division of the North, arrived in Aguascalientes.  She was ten years old. 

They came confident still, singing ballads of their triumphs…..  The Division of the North traveled in the manner classic to Mexican revolutionaries.  Troop trains scrambled and trudged in ceaselessly, bristling with soldiers, gorged to the windows with women and spoils that spilled out on the roof and the ground…. 

They camped in front of our house, a soldier to a tree.  His woman unrolled the blankets and spread a petate on the roots, drove nails into the trunk for hats and dug out a niche for an image.  If you adventurously walked the avenue you had to be careful or you’d step on somebody’s baby and dive into somebody’s stew.  Sometimes when the women quarreled … they rolled over and over in the dust, their hands buried in each other’s hair, biting scratching, dirty skirts flying and beads scattering, till the men, tired of this amusement (which didn’t end, like a cock-fight) roughly pushed them apart. 

There was always the sound of bugles and the shuffled march of sandaled feet; always the smell of scorching frijoles and prickling chile, always the rattle of gossip, always the patter of women’s hands making tortillas and never a moment there was not the wail of a new child and the haunt of an old song……

A great tourist hotel across a field from our garden was turned into a hospital.  One day we had the medical staff and some officers to lunch.  The doctors, odorous of their make-shift calling ate hardboiled eggs out of the shells with their knives, and told tales…tales of limbs gangrened and hacked off in the quick, without anesthetics (there were none) with a flip of a machete ……

This last paragraph gives a flavor of what the practice of medicine was like for Dr. Alberto Garcia during the Revolution.  He worked in field hospitals serving Venustiano Carranza’s army two years earlier, in 1913, at a time when Pancho Villa was aligned with him. 

Anita Brenner attends the University of Texas in Austin

The Mexican Revolution continued without resolution, and Anita Brenner’s family fled to San Antonio, Texas.  This was a year after Dr. Alberto G. Garcia and his family had fled to Austin from Mexico on a horse-drawn wagon.  Starting from scratch, Anita’s father sold plants and sundries, slowly building a large nursery and the San Antonio’s first major discount store.  He became the owner of the Continental Hotel. 

Anita Brenner, photograph by Edward Weston 1924

When Anita was 17, she enrolled in the University of Texas in Austin, starting the fall semester of 1922.  She was very unhappy there.  Austin’s government was in the process of being taken over by the Ku Klux Klan, with its hatred of Mexican immigrants and Jews.  Landlords operating rooming houses, refused to rent to Jewish UT students.  She was a social outcast, later writing: “I was a lonely, absurd awkward person.  I felt ugly and stupid.  I was ignored.  I resented and hated everything.  A bewildered, unhappy nobody.”    

Ku Klux Klan on Congress Avenue, Austin, 1921

There were bright spots that highlighted Anita’s intellect and presaged her future careers.  Anita took an English writing class from folklorist J. Frank Dobie and he became her lifelong friend.  She also joined the staff of the UT student newspaper, the Texan.

Four years earlier, Dr. Alberto Garcia also had taken journalism classes at UT and had also written for the Texan.   He then created La Vanguardia, a weekly that was the first Spanish-language newspaper in Austin.  La Vanguardia ceased publication a year before Anita Brenner arrived in Austin.  Anita certainly would have known about La Vanguardia.  And Dr. Garcia was well known for his fearlessness in resisting the Ku Klux Klan, for his supportive coverage of the Magonistas, Zapatistas, and other Mexican Revolutionaries, and for his denunciations of United States imperialism. Like Anita, Dr. Garcia had experienced the Mexican Revolution first-hand.  It is hard to imagine that Anita Brenner and Alberto Garcia would not have met each other. 

The homesick Anita Brenner would have found solace at Dr. Garcia’s large two-story 19th-Century home on Newning Avenue in South Austin at the literary and social events hosted by him and his wife Eva for Mexican students at UT and St. Edwards College.  Dr. Garcia provided coverage of one of his parties the year before in his own newspaper: “the informal social gathering of young Mexicans from the university and young ladies from the Mexican neighborhood of Austin at the home of Dr. Alberto G. Garcia” was initiated by the singing of the Mexican National Anthem.  “Other Mexican songs were sung by some of the young people in attendance.  Tamales, atole, and capirotada bread pudding were served.”  Dr. Garcia may have provided Anita Brenner with her first introduction to vegetarianism. Dr. Garcia had been raised in the home of America’s most influential vegetarian, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, and received his initial medical degree from Dr. Kellogg’s medical school.  Later in life, Anita too would become a vegetarian.

Alberto and Eva Garcia with their children, 1922

Voice of a Prophetic Spirit

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The home of Alberto G. Garcia, 1214 Newning Avenue, Austin, Texas

After the end of her second semester at UT, Anita Brenner attended a séance at a home she later vaguely described as being at the edge of town.  Dr. Garcia’s home was on the other side of the River from UT and most of the rest of the town, surrounded by empty wooded lots and a mere nine blocks from the southern city limits. Some of the neighborhood public school students arrived barefoot from shacks along the creeks and hills outside the City limits; they were children of the clannish cedar choppers who spoke an Elizabethan English dialect.  Dr. Garcia indeed lived at the edge of town.

Dr. Garcia probably was one of Anita’s few trustworthy social contacts.  It is possible that the séance took place in the Garcia home, and if so, it would have been appropriately discreet for Anita not to identify the eminent Garcia’s as the hosts.  Dr. Garcia had long been an astrologer and now was initiating a serious but secret life-long interest in such things as yoga and magic rituals evoking spirits and gods.

            Anita arrived at the séance after it had begun.  A voice called out to her:

You do not believe, and your pain is greater because you have no faith.  Your heart is rebellious, and you set your own spirit as the only reality. 

Today life is terrible for you, you are a rebel in futility.  But you shall go to a strange land, and there many men will want you, and you shall see many things that only lofty spirits know.  You will reach truth if you have faith….  Through your hand you will tell to the world many radiant things, for you have the gift and need only your faith.  Peace be with you.

When the séance was over, Anita went home and immediately made arrangements to leave Austin.  She returned to her family in San Antonio, and after her 18th birthday moved to Mexico City. 

               Within weeks of arriving in Mexico City, Anita wrote to Austin friend Geraldine Aron about her new community of artists, “sculptors, writers, socialists, musicians, poets …. No snobbishness, prejudice, of any sort—racial, monetary, apparent.”    Among her many Mexico City friends and acquaintances were the painter Jose Clemente Orozco, Mexican Feminist Party founder Elena Torres, balladeer Concha Michel, and Maria Sandoval de Zarco, the only practicing female lawyer in Mexico.   Friends Edward Weston and Tina Modotti used her as a model in some of their iconic photos.  She developed a close and long-standing friendship with Diego Rivera, and later became friends with Frida Kahlo. 

Rivera had deep connections to the spirit world.  Present at his birth was his mother’s uncle, a Spiritist.  In the 1920s, Rivera was a member of the Mexico City Rosicrucian lodge, and as Anita Brenner noted, Rivera’s “sister is a clairvoyant and he believes in apparitions and ghosts.”  The sister was a folk healer and performed limpia ceremonies on Anita to remove evil spirits. 

Anita Brenner, photographed by Edward Weston, 1924. This photo has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Whereas in Austin, Anita had been a wallflower, many men in Mexico did want her professionally and personally, as predicted by the Austin spirit prophet.  “That love is free is a matter so accepted that no one ever thinks to bother to state so,” she wrote. The prominent artist Jean Charlot pursued Anita and she enjoyed flirtations and seductions with boyfriends.  Not that she was the most attractive or alluring woman in Mexico City.  In a diary entry she expressed envy of Tina Modotti and the diffuse joy Tina received from her “numerous cohabitations.” 

Tina Modotti, photograph by Edward Weston 1923.

After a lunch with her friend Concha Michel, Anita wrote the following:

We have the same philosophy, which recognizes sex as the key to things, and the plane upon which woman’s position is placed—and should be.  Since it is creative energy, it is for her to direct it.  To be able to do so, she herself must be physically pure.  Therefore vegetarianism.

Like Concha, Diego Rivera, Edward Weston, Mexican Communist Party head Rafael Carrillo, US Communist exiles Bert and Ella Wolfe and others (including Dr. Alberto Garcia) with whom she broke bread, Anita became a vegetarian

Anita Brenner, photograph by Tina Modotti 1926

In Mexico City, Anita Brenner became a prolific journalist, an art critic, and an assistant to Manuel Gamio, who was the top anthropologist in Mexico and a Rosicrucian.  At the age of 21, three years after leaving Austin, Anita Brenner began researching and writing a pathbreaking book that when published three years later would become both influential and acclaimed.  Idols Behind Altars celebrated and explained to the world Mexican art and its underlying indigenous spirituality.  One of the Mexican artists Anita wrote about was Fermin Revueltas, who had attended St. Edwards College in Austin for one semester in 1917. Another book followed—a history of the Mexican Revolution called The Wind That Swept Mexico.

Anita went to Columbia University in New York in 1927 where she became friends with fellow student Margaret Mead.  Anita earned a Ph.D. in anthropology under Franz Boas (the leading anthropologist of the era) – all without first ever having received a college undergraduate or master’s degree. 

In 1929, while a New York student, she picked up a Bible to see what it might have to say about the ancient history of Chaldea and Babylonia.  Spontaneously, out of nowhere, Anita was seized by a profound transcendent experience. 

I had the queerest of sensations, which mentally were translated into question and answer, much as this: Question: But what exactly must I do with my abilities….  Answer: Pick up the thread of uncompromising spiritual and ethical thought, which means fight against almost everything in modern thought around you … which also means keep yourself as pure and lofty of mind as you can.  [The experience] grew and grew and I had feelings of faintness and a tremendous sensation of being out of the world….  If I had seen anything “supernatural” I would not have been in the least surprised.  That was my mood….  And then I got a sensation of reluctance, because I realized the full implications of what the proposal was … and I nearly said aloud, “No, no, I am just an ordinary normal craftsman,” and I got burning sensations in my mouth … and not until I “submitted” did it stop; after which I was thoroughly exhausted.       

Anita continued spiritual pursuits.  After her friend and former Pancho Villa lieutenant Manuel Hernandez Galvan was murdered, she contacted him and carried out a conversation with him through a Spiritist automatic writing technique. 

In June of 1926, Diego Rivera had come over to her Mexico City apartment and the two had a long talk.  She wrote, “At midnight I was exalted and converted.”  She had become a revolutionary.  In 1932, Anita read the Bolshevik Leon Trotsky’s autobiography: “What a book and what a man. Inevitably getting more and more interested in things Marxian.”  The next year Anita interviewed Trotsky in Paris where he had gone to avoid Stalin’s assassins.  Trotsky predicted “a great war (I do not speak of a small preventative war)” initiated by a rearmed Germany.  And the transition from capitalism to socialism, prophesied Trotsky, would be measured in generations, not years.

From New York Anita Brenner devoted herself to international efforts to get a fair trial for nine African American boys convicted by an all-male and all-white jury in Alabama of raping a white woman.  In reversing the convictions, the U.S. Supreme Court established new precedent in recognizing both the constitutional right to counsel and the unconstitutionality of the exclusion of African Americans from juries.  

In 1933, Anita was interviewed by a female journalist who wrote that the petite, “vivacious, dark-haired Anita Brenner looks more like a college girl than a full-fledged author, registered anthropologist with a Ph.D from Columbia.  She greets her guests in green lounging pajamas, topped with a brightly flowered coat.  She bubbles with girlish enthusiasm, talking eagerly and shaking her short curls.”  That same year, Anita Brenner went to Spain as a war correspondent for The Nation and the New York Times Magazine.  The newly-established democratic government of Spain was threatened by fascist and other right-wing forces.  She found in Spain a country similar to Mexico, but in a continuing state of revolutionary transformation.  The Leftist government was supported and armed by the government of Mexico.  She wrote:

The most thrilling thing in Spain are the workers.  Revolution and all that really means something here.  Makes all our [United States] intellectuals’ committees and the ILD look awfully silly, because from this perspective it is plain that we were doing everything in a vacuum, and all the people who were doing it were miles away from being workers.

The genocide perpetrated by General Franco’s fascist forces (and fueled by Texaco oil and equipped by Adolph Hitler’s Germany) took a horrific toll on the Spanish democratic forces.  If this were not enough, Anita Brenner (now pregnant in 1936) took note that Joseph Stalin’s Communist newspaper Pravda had announced from Moscow: “As for Catalonia, the purging of Trotskyites and the Anarcho-Syndicalists has begun; it will be conducted with the same energy it was conducted in the U.S.S.R.”  Anita publicized the clandestine prisons and the assassinations managed in Spain by Stalinist operatives like Tina Modotti’s lover Vittorio Vidali. Anita exposed some of the activities of her former friend Tina Modotti as a Stalinist agent.

Returning to New York City in 1938, Anita and her husband threw a famous Day of the Dead Halloween Party attended by Frida Kahlo, philosopher-educator John Dewey, artist and designer Isamu Noguchi, and the ghostly Whittaker Chambers who had just left the Communist Party and was hiding out, fearing assassination.  During this time, Anita was also writing a column for Mademoiselle magazine. 

Frida Kahlo, photograph by Anita Brenner

Anita Brenner defended and sought refuge for many socialists targeted by Stalin and Hitler.  She played a critical role in helping protect Stalin’s greatest opponent, Leon Trotsky.  When she learned that Trotsky’s latest country of asylum had a new government with a Nazi SS Minister of Justice, she contacted Diego Rivera and convinced him to petition the President of Mexico to grant Trotsky asylum.  Asylum was granted and Trotsky moved into Diego Rivera’s and Frida Kahlo’s home in Mexico City.  Following an affair with Frida Kahlo, Trotsky moved into his own compound, where one of Stalin’s agents finally breached his security and killed him with a pickaxe as he worked at his desk. 

Leon Trotsky in his Mexico City home, at his desk where he was later assassinated

Anita Brenner never forgot Austin.  The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas holds a first edition copy of Anita Brenner’s 1943 book The Wind That Swept Mexico: The History of the Mexican Revolution.  The book is autographed by her and inscribed to J. Frank Dobie. 

John Lomax (who popularized Ledbelly, Woody Guthrie, and Muddy Waters) with J. Frank Dobie.

The racism, anti-Semitism, and parochialism of Austin during the years 1922 and 1923 had made Anita miserable.  Yet an Austin séance she attended showed her a way out, filled her with confidence, and instantaneously propelled her into a future unforeseeable to anyone outside of the spirit world. At the séance, a spirit’s voice acknowledged her deep alienation in Austin and called her to greatness in another land where “many men will want you, and you shall see many things that only lofty spirits know” and “tell to the world many radiant things.” Whether she heard this voice in Dr. Alberto Garcia’s home or heard it in the home of one of the Spiritualists, Theosophists, Rosicrucians, Hermeticists or Oddfellows inhabiting Austin during those years, the prophecy turned out to be both accurate and transformative for Anita Brenner.

In the last years of her life, Anita returned to her family farm in Aguascalientes and revived it.  After her death, Anita was not forgotten in Aguascalientes.  Some years after her passing, an apparition said to be her was reportedly observed, according to her daughter, “about three feet off the ground…playing with children at the low-income housing project built on the farm’s orchards.  [S]he instructed the children to plant trees, to love and respect the earth.” 

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia (2020).  Susannah Joel Glusker, Anita Brenner: A Mind of Her Own (1998); Margaret Hooks, Tina Modotti (1993); Mexico Modern (Albrecht & Mellins, eds., 2017); Austin City Directory (1922).

#AnitaBrenner #AustinTexas #JFrankDobie #MexicanRevolution #DrAlbertoGGarcia #TinaModotti #Edward Weston #Frida Kahlo #DailyTexan #LeonTrotsky #Spirits #seances

BEATS and BUDDHISTS IN Texas, India, Boulder and Chicago

by

Chicago 7 Trial and Allen Ginsberg

In high school, I was the guy who read Playboy magazine for the photos and the articles.  Playboy exposed me to queer Allen Ginsberg and his radical ideas for human liberation.  In 1969 I tried to go see the Chicago 7 trial where those supporting the anti-Vietnam-War Festival of Life were accused of inciting a riot.  Allen Ginsberg testified as a witness.  By that time, Ginsberg was a celebrated poet, and had used Sanskrit mantras to try to calm the Chicago police riot.  

Ginsberg chanting Sanskrit mantras in Chicago’s Lincoln park during 1968 Festival of Life

In the Playboy article, Ginsberg reminisced:

[The afternoon of] the day before the the convention began–a lot of us were wandering around Lincoln Park when unexpectedly the police showed up with guns and clubs. Nobody knew when the police were going to attack…. Police fear everywhere. So I sat down and began chanting [the mantra] OM. I thought I would chant about 20 minutes and calm myself down, but the chanting stretched into [eight] hours, and a big circle surrounded me. A lot of people joined in the chanting.

After about 15 minutes, my breathing became regular … as if I was breathing the air of heaven into myself and then circulating it back out into heaven. After awhile, the air inside and out became the same–what the Indians call prana, the vital, silvery, evanescent air.

Then I began to feel a funny tingling in my feet that spread until my body was one rigid electrical tingling–a solid mass of lights. it was around 8 pm now and I’d been facing the [100-story] John Hancock Building, which was beginning to light up. I felt like the building except I realized that it wasn’t alive and I was. Then I felt a rigidity within my body, almost like a a muscle armor plating. With all this electric going up and down and this rigid muscle thing I had to to straighten my back to make a clear passage for whatever flow there was: my hands began vibrating.

If there’d been panic and police clubs at the moment, I don’t think I would have minded the damage. Clubbing would have seemed a curiously impertinent intrusion from skeleton phantoms–unreal compared with the natural omnipresent electric universe I was in.

Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Alan Watts and the unknown siddha.

Allen Ginsberg was an ur-Beat.  In The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia, I write about the presence of Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady and other Beats in Texas while Dr. Garcia lived there –in the late 1940s. 

Burroughs had substantial agricultural properties in Texas, including a marijuana and poppy farm in the East Texas piney woods. Fifty years before the arrival of these Beats, this area of Texas had been populated with socialists — as well as Hermeticists and Rosicrucians: people who practiced an alchemical tantra, followers of the big hashish importer and prominent Civil War-era, black, rights activist Paschal Randolph. The Beats were unaware of this legacy and had no idea that a being, a siddha, like Dr. Alberto G. Garcia was living in Texas, practicing tantric yoga, raising kundalini up his spine through glowing spinning chakras, and selflessly serving humanity.

For his citrus operation in South Texas, close to the Texas border, William Burroughs relied on workers who he called “wetbacks,” leaving him plenty of time for psilocybin, booze, Benzadrine, heroin and schemes to raise cockroaches as chicken feed.  Ginsburg complained to Burroughs about his exploitive practices and would have appreciated the politics of Dr. Garcia.  The doctor’s discipline and sobriety, however, would not have been appealing to the Beats.     

Dr. Garcia’s life and experiences in Texas as a Mexican American and as a yogi adds perspective to the Beats as men (they almost all were men) and as seekers of nirvana and other freedoms.  In the book, I disclose the scathing and insightful comments Dr. Garcia wrote about the about Beat philosopher Alan Watts.   

William Burroughs & Allan Ginsberg 1952
Neal Cassady

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Of the Beats, it was Allen Ginsberg whose spiritual search seemed deepest and most profound.  More than a decade after leaving Texas, Ginsberg traveled to India where he met in passing a 24-year-old Tibetan monk named Chögyam Trungpa.  Trungpa failed to make any impression on Ginsberg.  In 1970, Ginsberg again happened to run into Trungpa on a Manhattan street, where he talked him into giving up his taxicab for him and his father.   Chögyam Trungpa had come to the United States to teach a Buddhist tantric yoga.  Trungpa was a “Rinpoche,” a reincarnate guru.  Ginsberg became Trungpa’s student and helped him create a Buddhist university, the Naropa Institute, in Boulder Colorado, at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  Later while looking at old photos, Ginsberg saw a photo of himself with the young monk Chögyam Trungpa in India in 1963.  He had completely forgotten he had met him there. 

            In 1975, on a summer break from college, I attended Naropa Institute.  I had already been doing the Yoga-Sutra-based practice of Transcendental Meditation.  I wasn’t looking for a guru.  In spite of the great heights many humans have reached, I was well-aware of human frailties and the corrupt pull of the contemporary world.  I was suspicious of any approach to yoga that required submission to a human being.  But I knew Chögyam Trungpa to possess an unsurpassed eloquence on matters of spirituality.  And I wanted to see what was there for me to see.

            At Naropa I sat in on Allen Ginsberg’s class on poetry, and got a salute from him in front of the school in apparent recognition of the bliss I happened to be feeling at the moment.  I took classes in Gestalt Therapy, Tai Chi and physics for non-physicists.  I attended readings by Ginsberg and by William Burroughs. 

Burroughs was not a student of Trungpa—or even a Buddhist.  But Ginsberg got him and other Beat literary luminaries to appear at the Institute.  In the 1950s, Burroughs had left Texas to avoid a conviction for drugs.  There at a party, by drunken and careless mistake, he shot and killed his wife.  Burroughs sought to exorcise his demons using the legacy of magic practices taught by Aleister Crowley.  (Crowley had headed a Rosicrucian organization and in 1914 had associated with and shared teachings with Dr. Alberto Garcia’s Rosicrucian magus and maestro George Plummer.)  When I saw Burroughs at Naropa Institute, he looked a bit grim and hollowed out, like a businessman trapped in the same demimonde as the dark characters in his book.  I enjoyed his readings more than his writing.  He read with a sarcastic voice of a huckster, a voice that seemed oddly familiar to me.  His performance revealed to me far more humor in the text than had been evident from my own reading of it.

From left to right: Chögyam Trungpa, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute in 1975.

The highlight of Naropa Institute was the weekly lectures by Trungpa, held in a high school stage.   Trungpa would sit wearing a western business suit, and drinking what appeared to be water out of a large glass.  It was universally understood that the “water” in fact was saké.  We sat on the gymnasium floor.  Often, I ended up sitting near the poet W.S. Merwin and his girlfriend Dana Naone.  Trungpa had long given up the monk’s vow of renunciation.  He was very engaged in the world with all of its “vices,” which he saw as just more material to work with and use to gain enlightenment.

Buddhist Reginald Ray documented that when Trungpa was a young boy in a Tibetan monastery, even then one of his young companions noticed “there was something unpredictable, uncanny, and somewhat frightening about him.”  Trungpa delighted in puncturing “spiritual materialism” and with genius he wielded withering and aggressive blows to “the ego.”  At this time, my ego was rather puny, so I was not drawn to pursue his teachings.   It was amusing, though, to witness his handling of the Beat poet Gregory Corso – who periodically attempted to disrupt Trungpa’s lectures with drunken shouting.  Three months after I left Naropa Institute, W.S. Merwin and Dana Naone got quite fed up with Trungpa when they experienced him at his most aggressive extreme.

W.S. Merwin & Dana Naone

I never did any Buddhist practice while I was at Naropa.  I just kept doing my TM and learned some Tai Chi. 

My only direct interaction with Chögyam Trungpa was at a café owned by his disciples.  I was eating dinner with my dorm mate John.  His eyes got big when he noticed that his guru was sitting at an overcrowded booth behind me, smoking, drinking and whooping it up with his wife and friends and students.  As Trungpa’s party was breaking up, he stood up and pivoted over to our table to return a chair he had borrowed before we even arrived.   John and I both kind of stared.  Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche looked at me and said, “You are welcome.”  Yes, he nailed me.  My interest in manners was non-existent.  I tended to perceive manners at best as something beside the point or at worst something oppressively bourgeois and manipulative. It was an accurate and gentle little lesson Trungpa gave me. 

Agnihotra

Ironically, while at Naropa Institute I learned no Buddhist techniques – but instead I picked up a Vedic fire ritual called Agnihotra, a ritual that was practiced in what is now India, Nepal, and Pakistan thousands of years before the birth of Buddha. My dormmate had been practicing Agnihotra every day before he came to Naropa Institute.   After his arrival at Naropa, he had asked Trungpa about Agnihotra and Trungpa told him to drop it if he was going to be a Buddhist.  This is despite the fact that early Buddhist Pali texts extolled the benefits of Agnihotra. 

Agnihotra was mentioned in the Yajur Veda and Atharva Veda, which were compiled perhaps 5000 years ago.  And from these Vedas also came yoga and the Yoga Sutra practices I had been doing and still do.  Agnihotra is a short ceremony performed precisely at sunrise and sunset, with mantras amplified by the flames of a fire. Performing Agnihotra subtly opened something up in me.  Every ceremony seemed to strengthen my wakefulness and vivify prana in a palpable way.  It was a way to give thanks for manifest existence.  Like Transcendental Meditation, one purpose of Agnihotra is to promote peace and harmony in the environment.

More than fifteen years later, when I was living and practicing law in Washington, D.C., I attended an Agnihotra ceremony at a large group home in the Maryland countryside.  Passing through the large house I walked by other much-longer Vedic rituals being performed, with chanting and the pouring of large ladles of ghee in the fire.  And twenty years after that, while I was initiated into some Yoga Sutra siddhis, surprisingly I seemed to hear and sense in another realm sounds and sights of similar Vedic offerings and chants.

The Dalai Lama and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s Reincarnation

In January of 2011, my law firm gave me a three-month sabbatical, and I went to India.  Most of the time I was in India I was involved in legal advocacy for displaced shanty-town dwellers and for a national movement to block foreign big box retail stores like Wal Mart from the Indian market. The photo below is of me at a tent erected on the side of a major highway in Delhi to provide shelter for a few of the 100,000 people whose homes had been burned and bull-dozed to make way for accommodations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

Me with children whose homes had been destroyed by the City of New Delhi.

In March, I headed to the Himalayas and Dharamsala and McCleod Ganj, home in India to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile.  I was going to hang out there with my friend Jamie for a few days.

I was familiar with Tibet’s predicament.  When I was working for Justice Lloyd Doggett at the Texas Supreme Court in 1994, a top jurist from China came to visit the Court.  He had been a judge in the trial of Mao Tse Tung’s wife after Mao’s death, when the Chinese Communist Party had turned against the Cultural Revolution.  At the reception, in front of some of the Supreme Court justices, I questioned this eminent jurist, laying a foundation, and tripping him up with a cross-examination about the Chinese judicial system and how it was that a group of three Tibetan nuns could have been recently sentenced to long prison terms merely for singing Buddhist hymns.  Probably no one had ever done this to him before and it probably was extremely embarrassing to him.  His next stop was the UT law school.  I had alerted local Tibetan exiles and they appeared in full force to protest the Chinese occupation and colonization of Tibet.  A Republican federal Fifth Circuit judge who appeared with this Chinese jurist apologized and expressed shame and embarrassment that this Communist jurist should have been accorded such an impolite reception in Texas.  There I was again, with my bad manners.  But I don’t think Chögyam Trungpa would have minded.

Now in 2011, I was in the city that was the capital of the Tibetan government in exile.  My friend Jamie and I stayed in a cheap hotel, staffed by some very young Tibetan guys, who didn’t seem to take anything very seriously.  I insisted on space heaters at night the Himalayan temperature got quite cold.  Two ultimately were delivered to our room.  Besides emanating heat, however, they also emanated light.  Lots of light.  Enough light to brightly illuminate our room all night long.  It was like having two airport runway floodlights at the foot of our beds.  One night after Jamie fell asleep and I was about to lay down in my bed, the cord to the little reading lamp on our nightstand suddenly caught fire.  Flames shot up, died out and then shot up again.  I unplugged the lamp and we put the fire out.  We were greeted with smiles and laughter when I told the boys at the front desk what had happened.  A lamp that could not emit light because it burned itself up with hot flames, and a heater that emitted an immense light.  Was this Buddhist tantra?

Late on my next-to-last day in Dharamsala, I decided to try to visit the Karmapa.  The Karmapa is a figure like the Dalai Lama, but subordinate to him.  He officiates over another lineage of monks and was widely expected to temporarily take over the Tibetan Government-In-Exile when the current 14th Dalai Lama dies.  He is in his twenties and, like the Dalai Lama, is the reincarnation of his predecessor.  The Karmapa’s monastery is located further down in the foothills from Dharamsala, in a small village in a rural area about an hour or so away.  So I hired a little three-wheeled tck-tck to traverse the foothills.  These vehicles are like juiced up golf carts, with dashboard shrines.  The driver was in front with his wife and I was on the back seat.   I had been on these vehicles on the expressways of Delhi going 60-miles-per-hour.  It did not seem they were designed for that and it was unclear what they were designed for.  But they were the popular and affordable taxis of India. 

The Karmapa’s monastery complex with its central temple was beautiful and appeared immaculately maintained. 

Karmapa’s temple and monastery

The Karmapa heads the lineage to which Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche belonged.  By now, Trungpa had been dead for 24 years, and a reincarnation had been found.  Given Trungpa’s wild behavior in this last reincarnation, I had heard that the monks were keeping an especially close watch on the boy.  He was born in Chinese-occupied Tibet.  I wondered whether he was still in China or whether he too had escaped.  I thought that the monks at Karmapa’s facility might know where he is now.  But of the monks I talked to, some had heard of Chögyam Trungpa, but no one knew where his new incarnation was, or at least was willing to say.  The Karmapa had an open office on certain days and welcomed visits from Americans and others.  But the day I arrived it turns out the Karmapa was out of town.  His temple was locked up and deserted. 

I later learned that Chögyam Trungpa’s reincarnation, the 12th Trungpa, at the time was 22 years old and living in a monastery within Tibet.

The 12th Trungpa, Chogyam Trungpa’s reincarnation.

As I walked out of the monastery compound, the tck-tck driver and his wife were waiting for me to take me back to Dharamsala.  As we headed out of town and up the first foothill, it became clear that the tck-tck had developed some sort of mechanical problem that caused it to stall going up steep slopes with a heavy weight like myself aboard.  So, every time we reached a steep incline I had to get out and push the tck-tck and the driver and his wife up the Himalayan foothills.  When we got to the top, I jumped in and coasted down the hill until we reached the next incline.  This is how the up-and-down trip went, all the way back to Dharamsala.  But I was not bothered a bit.  I was so happy just to be in the Himalayas and be surrounded by so many yogis.  And I was happy to help these poor souls who owned the tck-tck get their injured vehicle back home. 

After I got back to the hotel, I saw that my future wife Joy had sent me a Facebook message from Austin, Texas, indicating that a major event was happening the morning, my last day in McLeod Ganj.  The Dalai Lama was scheduled to speak.  There was no sign or notice in McCleod Ganj that such a thing was happening.  I asked our young Tibetan hotel operators and true to form they were clueless.  On further inquiry from others, we learned that this day, March 10, was Uprising Day, commemorating the opposition to Chinese rule in 1959, a revolt that was put down by Chinese violence.  The Dalai Lama was supposed to make an address and it would be followed by a political march.  How strange it was that Joy, back home in Texas, was aware of this when Tibetans and tourists a few feet away from the Dalai Lama’s home were not?

Early the next morning, I was denied entrance to the Kalachakra temple complex where the Dalai Lama was speaking because I had a camera.  The speech was to be in untranslated Tibetan, so therefore I decided to hang on to my camera and photograph the surrounding activities rather than attend the speech. 

Dalai Lama speaking at the main temple across from his home.

After the speech was over, I was given a written English translation—and it was a bombshell!  The Dalai Lama had announced that he was stepping down as political leader of the Tibetan Government in Exile.  For centuries the post of Dalai Lama had encompassed both the spiritual leadership and political leadership of Tibet.  What the current Dalai Lama seemed to be saying is that he would no longer serve as the political leader of Tibet.  From now on, the Tibetans would elect their own prime minister who would be the political leader of the Tibetan Government in Exile.  By this act, the Dalai Lama ended a form of Theocracy and brought reform that was more consistent with 21st Century notions of democracy.

With predictable ridiculousness, the revolutionaries and dialectical materialists in the Chinese communist government objected to the Dalai Lama’s rejection of the old custom political leadership based on a reincarnated inheritance.  The Times of India reported as follows:

[T]he Chinese-appointed governor of Tibet said the exiled leader did not have a right to choose his successor the way he wanted.  ‘We must respect the historical institutions and religious rituals of Tibetan Buddhism,’ he said.  “It is not up to anyone whether to abolish the reincarnation institution or not.”

After the Dalai Lama’s speech, thousands of young Tibetans were on the streets of McCleod Ganj, holding banners, manning bullhorns.  It was Uprising Day.  A march proceeded along a forested road.  Some people sold copies of a newspaper within which the relative merits of the three candidates for the position of the Tibetan prime minister were being debated. 

Uprising Day crowd 2011
Uprising Day marchers

The tantric yoga of Dr. Alberto G. Garcia

Dr. Alberto’s yoga practice in Austin Texas, which stretched from 1922 or so to 1962, was derived from a tantric interpretation of the Yoga Sutra. Like some of the Tibetan practices, the teachings he followed involved energizing the chakras and bringing kundalini up the spine. It also included tantric sex. Dr. Garcia’s yoga involved adherence to a strict interpretation of the “ethical” yama and niyama limbs of the Yoga Sutra as well as self-less service. Like the yoga of the Dalai Lama, it involved participating in political and social revolution. The Dalai Lama has identified himself as a Marxist. While Dr. Garcia did not, he for most of his life affiliated with Marxist and Communist working class movements and defended communists during the McCarthy era. The story of this unique early Texas yogi is found in The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia.

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia (2020); Allen Ginsberg: Spontaneous Mind, Selected Interviews 1958-1996 (Carter, ed., 2001); Rob Johnson, The Lost Years of William Burroughs: Beats in South Texas (2006); Reginald A. Ray, Chögyam Trungpa as a Siddha, Recalling Chögyam Trungpa (Midal, ed., 2005); Tom Clark, The Great Naropa Poetry Wars (1980); H.W. Bodewitz, The Daily Evening and Morning Offering (Agnihotra) According to the Brahmanas (1976); Vasant V. Paranjpe, Grace Alone (1971); Vasant V. Paranjpe, Light Towards Divine Path (1976); Premenda Priyadarshi, In Quest of the Dates of the Vedas (2014); Michael Danino, The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati (2010).

NIGHTHAWK Jorge Luis Borges and Dr. Alberto Garcia in Austin, Texas

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Surrounded by space-age automobile tail fins at midcentury-modern Nighthawk restaurant on Austin’s Guadalupe Street, an elderly upper-class Latin American man named Jorge Luis Borges, dressed in suit and tie, was often found holding court in the Fall of 1961.  This steak and burger restaurant was a hangout for University of Texas faculty and students.  Borges was a visiting faculty member and had his office nearby at Batts Hall.  His presence was a big deal. All “his lectures were filled to capacity.”   

Fourteen years later, Borges would published a short story called The Bribe about a UT professor who had his first lunch with his academic antagonist at the Nighthawk in 1969. As a point of pride this professor let it be known that he forbid his students to come to class “dressed like hippies.”

Dreams – and memories of La Vanguardia & Bécquer

Austin made a deep impression on Borges and he would come to call himself “a citizen of Geneva, Montevideo, Austin, and (like all men) Rome.” The rest of North America meant nothing to him.  Asked why he liked Austin so much, he replied “I dream well there.”  

Borges once wrote of a lucid dream, engaged in night after night, where the dreamer with assistance from the god of fire labors to dream up a real human.  The dreamed man awakes in the dreamer’s dream and slowly comes to realize that he is a mere appearance. This realization provokes existential terror but also relief in the knowledge that the fires apparently threatening him are as imaginary as he is.    

Did Dr. Alberto G. Garcia ever meet or hear Jorge Luis Borges when he was in Austin? 

Dr. Garcia loved Spanish literature.  In his Austin newspaper La Vanguardia, the Mexican immigrant and new US citizen Dr. Garcia 40 years earlier had serialized Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer.  Borges, in 1962, would reach for Bécquer’s image of a harp to describe the magic of books.   

Both Borges and Garcia loved libraries. Dr. Garcia would often go to the University’s library in the tower not far from Batts Hall, a tower tall enough to loom over the Nighthawk.

Latin American Spokesmen

Borges was a Latin American dignitary, an intellectual giant.  In decades past, Dr. Garcia would be one of the hosts welcoming any such personage coming to Austin. But in 1961, Dr. Garcia was no longer a public intellectual, and no longer a Latino spokesman. He was humbly pre-occupied with administering to his sick patients, practicing astrology and yoga—and enjoying the last year of his life. 

Dr. Alberto Garcia, by 1961, was almost deaf.  Jorge Luis Borges was almost blind.  

Time and Yoga

Blindness brought to Borges an enjoyment of solitude, a solitude where sometimes “I simply don’t think and am merely content to exist.  I let time flow past me, and it seems to pass differently.”  In A New Refutation of Time, Borges recalled an ecstasy in a “holiday from thought” and “vertiginous silence” where he experienced “eternity.” After reviewing treatises written by Buddhist yogis, Borges wrote: “Time is a delusion: the difference and inseparability of one moment belonging to its apparent past from another belonging to its apparent present is sufficient to disintegrate it….  And yet, and yet…Time is the substance I am made of.  Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river, it is a tiger which destroys me; … it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.  The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”  

In solitude, Dr. Garcia went to rest in silence and existence unmanifest. He applied certain teachings of the Yoga Sutra. One section of the text describes an enlightenment where “Sequence, which depends upon moments, is liberated at the final end of transformations.”  Dr. Garcia wrote: “The momentary phenomenon, isolated for study and observation is recognized as an instant coming from the unknown and going to the unknown.  It is a crystalized expression of God.”  Yet Dr. Garcia too could not ignore his identity and agency in the successive movement of Time out of moments: 

Moments are like the atoms of fuel which I ignite.

Like fairy creatures, they rush and whirl about me, 

seeking an outlet for their flash expression. 

How they express depends upon me…. 

It is I who generate them into objective being;

It is I who assist or retard them in their ideal attainment.

They are infinite in their number and variety.

I may choose, but why choose?

Let each one come in its time; I will express them

  In all their resplendent beauty and variety.

Theosophists guided Dr. Garcia in his yoga. Borges hoped for a Theosophical realm of eternal memory, but he doubted the existence of such a thing.   

Dr. Alberto G. Garcia
November 1961
at the Maximilian Room of the Driskill Hotel

William F. Buckley Sr. & Jr.

An Austin oil tycoon named Will Buckley had been an adversary of Dr. Garcia’s, disrupting his life, his father’s life, and causing untold suffering among his fellow Mexicans.  The son of Will Buckley, William F. Buckley Jr., once flew to Argentina to interview Borges for his television show.  

Hermes and Hermaphrodite

Borges described the “illusory library” of “that one god, Hermes Trismegistus,” consisting of “variously estimated number of books (42, according to Clement of Alexandria; 20,000, according to Iamblichus; 36,525, according to the priests of Thoth, who is also Hermes), on whose pages all things were written.”  The description of God as Pascal’s sphere found within “the Hermetic books almost enables us to envisage that sphere.” “Almost” –because for Borges existence was a riddle, a contradiction and perhaps an impossibility.  

Dr. Garcia closely read a book attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. And in his home in Travis Heights, Dr. Garcia perhaps was a conjurer of Hermes and Hermaphrodite.  

Jorge Luis Borges and Dr. Alberto G. Garcia would appear to have had much to talk about in the Fall of 1961.  

Yet Borges, “unfortunately,” was Borges.

Borges had espoused pro-slavery beliefs.  He believed that blacks were happier enslaved than free.  Alberto knew better, and had joined a Mexican army in 1913 to fight for the Maderistas who freed Mexican slaves. He had risked his life by resisting the Ku Klux Klan in Austin in the 1920s. Dr. Garcia associated with Marxists, denounced imperialism and fought a dictator.  Borges, in contrast, pleased men like William F. Buckley Jr. by calling for the execution of Marxist intellectual Régis Debray while he was a captive of the Bolivian military dictatorship.

To those who asked, Borges proclaimed: “I dislike Mexico and the Mexicans.”  

It is perhaps just as well that Borges never saw Dr. Garcia, and just as well that history does not record Dr. Garcia ever hearing or meeting Borges during the moments of time when they both lived in Austin.   

Sources

Brad Rockwell, The Life and Times of Alberto G. Garcia (2020).

Alberto Garcia, Space, on file in the Austin History Center; Alberto G. Garcia, M.D., My Moments, on file in the Austin History Center; Yoga Sutra IV 33; Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969 (1970); Jorge Luis Borges, The New Refutation of Time, Labyrinths (1962); Jorge Luis Borges, The Fearful Sphere of Pascal; Rodolfo Braceli, Borges, in Caras, Caritas y Caretas (1996); Elizabeth Beaudin, Writing Against Time, Jorge Luis Borges (Bloom, ed., 2004); Peter La Salle, Borges and Batts Hall, Texas Observer (Jan. 7, 2005); Charlie Binkow, Texas, the state that stole the heart of literary giant Jorge Luis Borges, Ransom Center Magazine (October 22, 2015); Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonia Express (1979); Jorge Luis Borges interviewed by William F. Buckley Jr. on Firing Line.   

Common Nighthawk, North America’s Bird Nursery, Boreal Songbird Initiative (2015): Oölogists and their confederates point out that the name “nighthawk” is a misnomer.   The bird “is not strictly nocturnal, often flying in sunlight, and it is not a hawk….”  

#JorgeLuisBorges #WilliamFBuckleyJr. #YogaTimelessness #DrAlbertoGGarcia #HermesTrismegistmus

WELCOME TO MY BLOG

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Whether you have yet read my biography of Alberto G. Garcia or not, this blog is will provide additional material relating to Alberto G. Garcia, to other subjects covered in the book and in new upcoming books, and to my own life. The blog will include parts left out of the Alberto Garcia book, writings on yoga, on Mexican and Texas history, on Second Sight and other supernormal abilities.


You will have a chance to weigh in with your own comments and I encourage you to do so.