Archival Things: Organizer Notes #1

District 9. Minnesota. This is a Finnish prairie. I call it the Finnish woods. It’s dark and dreary for us here. We have a few English and South Slavic outposts. They control everything that is worth and worthless. We couldn’t touch this district even if we move the CI [Communist International] into Minneapolis. The state is a Finnish Cooperative Commonwealth.

District 13. [San Francisco] … Very little if any political activities. This is a home of retired radicals. Not even retired revolutionists.

District 15. Connecticut. In this case we are planning to remove the district – not the district organizer. We will shortly make it a sub-district of New York. There is nothing here worthwhile speaking of.

No Comment Archival Thing

In 1947, Charles S. Johnson was sworn in as the first Black president of Fisk University.

Pundit Thing: Obama’s First 100

Foreign Policy asked thirty-five pundits to evaluate Obama’s first 100 days in office. Among the various curmudgeonly, sycophantic and ponderous assessments of the style and execution of the President’s foreign policy–some of which do bring up relevant and important issues–this tidbit from Andrew Bacevich stood out:

Yet when it comes to fundamentals, Obama gets at best an “I,” for incomplete. There is little evidence that his administration has even begun to connect the dots between the foreign-policy failures that defined the Bush era and the economic crisis that defines the age of Obama. Bluntly, the American Century has ended. The world no longer sees the United States as alpha and omega, source of salvation and sustenance, vanguard of history, guiding spirit, and inspiration for all humankind. Obama faces the challenge — and the opportunity — of conceptualizing what follows the American Century, a feat that will require not only dialogue and realism, but also historical imagination and creativity.