I am continually amazed by how timid, reticent or terrified so many of my fellow liberals, progressives and Democrats are when it comes to strictly enforcing the law against Donald Trump.
The most recent example came just this week, when Trump made a blatant social media threat against potential witnesses or co-conspirators whose testimony under oath could send him to prison for a very long time: “If you go after me, I’m coming after you.” His threatwas smoking-gun evidence of witness intimidation, in direct opposition to what the arraignment judge in Federal Court in DC, at Trump’s latest arrest, explicitly warned him NOT to do. As a chronic criminal recidivist going back decades, he did it anyway.
When I received my JD from Hofstra University’s School of Law some 40 years ago, it was pounded home to me in every class in criminal law, evidence, criminal procedure and constitutional law, that if you broke the law, you needed to be prepared to pay the price. Direct violation of a judge’s order on witness tampering or intimidation was a sure ticket to getting your bail revoked, and being remanded to prison, ahead of your trial.
I witnessed first hand how that pillar of the law was enforced over and over again in many Mob trials of the 1980’s and 1990’s, concerning members of New York’s Five major crime families. I was particularly familiar with how it was used against the Gambino Crime Family, since my brother was associated with that crew and went to prison for income tax evasion. The law was the law. Break it, and you suffer the consequences. Threaten people involved with your case, and you run the risk of pre-trial detention, since you are a danger to the community. The Mob guys, including my brother, cursed the prosecutors, the judges and the FBI every time they got caught. Just like Trump.
That theoretical purity of consequences for one’s actions was one reason I loved studying the law. In a perfect legal system, neither income, nor level of education, nor family connections, nor race, ethnicity or gender would matter: the law was the law, and should be equally applied. Of course, I knew the real world practice of the law was rarely so pure and simple, but it was the goal of “equal justice before the law,” toward which we could aspire. The law was a beacon of hope for fairness.
It was a big reason I went to work right out of law school with former New York State Governor Mario M. Cuomo, a superb lawyer and public official of impeccable integrity, who revered the law, as much as he did his faith. “The law is the law,” was Cuomo’s mantra, and I took comfort in that clarity.
So, I was surprised when I posted a rather mild statement on social media that “ Trump needs to be locked up NOW and silenced until his trial. He is in violation of every single one of the arraignment judge’s warnings.” It seemed to me to be a straightforward consequence of the action of blatantly violating a judge’s order.
What stunned me was the array of excuses offered by people I respect, ranging from outright cynicism in our judicial system’s ability to “do the right thing,” to oh-so-clever political strategizing of how an arrest would “play into Trump’s hands, make him a martyr, or provoke his vile supporters to violence.” Lost in all of the handwringing was that straightforward Cuomo mantra: “The law is the law.”
If Trump were a young, black teenager from Oakland, who violated a judge’s warning to not threaten any potential witnesses against him, we all knew how fast his bail would be revoked and he’d be thrown into jail. No consideration would be given to political strategy, nor whether his supporters would act violently, or illegally, to protest his arrest.
Lost in all of this mishigas and mish-mash over politics and strategy and Trump’s perceived power over a cult of lawless lunatics, is the well-documented fact that Trump is a wus, when it comes to the enforcement of the law, or raw power, used against him. The Gambino gang, who dealt with Trump regularly in the New York construction trades industry, knew this very well.
In my book, Tightrope: Balancing a Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother,” (Heliotrope Books, NY, 2017) I detailed the Mob’s delight in running roughshod over a terrified Trump. Michael Cody, the son of New York Teamster boss and Gambino associate John Cody, told the Daily Beast, as recently as 2016 that:
“Trump was a guy who would talk tough, but as soon as you confronted him, he would cry like a little girl. He was all talk, no action.”
In fact, for John Cody—who was sent to jail for five years for racketeering, extortion and income tax evasion– and his organized crime cronies, Trump was nothing more than an easy mark, a puffed up patsy, and wannabe mobster—terrified of them, and guys like them, who saw jail time as a mere cost of doing business.
Still, I find it astounding that so many good people, who are law-and-order liberals, like me, forget these facts which have been well documented by a long list of credible journalists and prosecutors over the past 30 plus years: Trump is a coward. He talks tough, but always runs from a fight. The louder he whines, the larger another loss looms.
Defendant Trump is, and has always been, both enamored and terrified of real power (legal, political, financial, or physical) and freezes in the face of those unafraid to wield it against him—like Vladimir Putin, Nancy Pelosi, or John Cody. The very thought of prison, and the guys who don’t fear it, reduce Trump to the whining little child he’s always been, since the days he threw temper tantrums in his mother’s rose-colored Rolls Royce, when she chauffeured him to a chic private school.
See how well that image sits in the minds of the low-wage, big-bellied, bearded and tattooed Trump supporters from Idaho, or Alabama, and West Virginia when he tells them to go to jail for him–a coddled, rich brat who always hid behind his mother and his father, or his less-than-ethical lawyers, for protection. The wise guys from Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx saw right through his bluster and bravado, and laughed in his crapulent, privileged face.
I suspect that a tough, seasoned and fearless prosecutor like Jack Smith, who has put away war criminals, and a no-nonsense U.S. District Judge like Tanya Chutkan– who has handed down lengthy prison terms to January 6 terrorists —will not be easily fooled or intimidated by such a cowardly, corrupt con man.
Trump may yet learn that jail time, for himself, is just another cost of doing business his way, and that by his own twisted actions and words, he’s made prison inevitable.
(Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sun Is Burning,” song, protests the use of Nuclear Weapons, and the use of the first two Atomic Bombs in world history by the US upon hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. Copyright by Simon & Garfunkel, 1964)
Try mightily not to get lost in the hollow Hollywood marketing blitzkrieg surrounding the impressive debut of the movie “Oppenheimer,” and the callous and brainless branding it as “Barbieheimer,” with the make-believe, pop-culture phenomenon of “The Barbie Movie.“
“Oppenheimer,” is a real-life story of human horror, not a concocted piece of a double-barreled magical cure for a movie industry which eats its artists, and cloaks the real reasons behind how and why America dropped the world’s first nuclear weapon on innocent civilians behind a compelling and complicated main character. Don’t let Hollywood hucksters vaporize US history into thin air the way hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens were slaughtered by our own country at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 78 years ago this month.
Yes, the facts behind “Oppenheimer” really happened, as did so many more horrific events surrounding it. We have to keep reminding young moviegoers, blinded by the bright Barbie flashes of pink lining up right next to the theatres in which “Oppenheimer” is screening, that one of these movies is far too real, not fiction. Yes, our country really did commit two back-to-back massive War Crimes against civilian populations, killing, burning and radiating more than 200,000 humans. And no, committing such War Crimes was not necessary to win World War II.
Hitler was already dead for 3 months, when the first bomb was dropped, the Nazis had surrendered, and Victory in Europe was already celebrated by the Allied Forces on May 8, 1945. The original justification for the US Manhattan Project headed by Oppenheimer—to beat the Nazis to developing an Atomic Bomb so they couldn’t use it against the world—no longer existed. And, the Japanese—with nowhere near the scientific sophistication of the Germans or the US, and their armies depleted, were about to surrender.
But, don’t take my word for it, just like you shouldn’t think “Oppenheimer” film-maker Christopher Nolan is the final word, or that the central angst of the story occurred inside the head of the Atomic bombs’ creator, or can be found in the unjust attacks upon J. Robert Oppenheimer’s patriotism. There are no heroes here.
Instead, listen to the warnings of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, who had just defeated the Nazis and liberated thousands of Jews from several Nazi concentration camps. Before the decision to use the bombs in World War II was made, in the summer of 1945, Eisenhower—just off the battlefield—expressed his strong reservations to President Harry Truman’s Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who was leading the charge to use the weapons because we had them. General Eisenhower, the most revered military leader in the United States at the time, made his position clear to Stimson:
“ I told him I was against it (using the bomb) on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon…”
However, what happened after the end of War World II in Europe and the dropping of the first Atomic bomb on Hiroshima just a few months later, was a carefully calculated plan of American military intimidation, aimed more at impressing Soviet leader Josef Stalin who, with Truman and Winston Churchill, were negotiating over the future of Post-War Europe at the Potsdam Conference in a Soviet-occupied part of Germany, according to historian Gar Alperovitz, in his masterful book of that period, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima & Potsdam—the Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power (Vintage Books, 1965, New York, N.Y.)
A growing chorus of battle-hardened military leaders like Eisenhower, strongly opposed sacrificing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians as human pawns in an international power struggle between the US and Russia. Admiral William D. Leahy, the most senior Naval Officer on duty during WW II, called the Atomic Bomb “barbarous,” and of “no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”
Perhaps the most damning assessment of the Truman/Stimson decision to drop the unnecessary and apocalyptic weapons of mass destruction upon the people of Hiroshima on August 6, and on Nagasaki three days later, came from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey:
“ Certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the War, and even if no invasion had been planned.”
And, even the Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Forces in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur stated numerous times before his death, that he believed the Atomic Bomb was completely unnecessary from a military point of view. In fact, as Oppenheimer himself later said, the original reason for developing the Bomb to beat the Nazis, morphed into something else:
“I don’t think there was a time where we worked harder at the speed up (of the development of the bomb) than in the period after the German surrender.”
Then, why did we then become the first and only nation in world history to drop, not one, but two nuclear weapons on civilian populations, despite the fears of some scientists, that even a test of the Bomb might set fire to the atmosphere and consume the globe in flames? Why did we do it, if the Atomic Bombs were no longer necessary to defeat the Germans or the Japanese and end World War II?
Some answers, like the outcomes of many criminal trials, reveal themselves in details, dates and bold face:
FDR died of a heart attack on April 12, 1945, at the beginning of his fourth term of office, elevating Harry Truman—inexperienced in foreign policy and who never previously met either Winston Churchill or Josef Stalin —to the Presidency;
Hitler killed himself a few weeks later on April 30, 1945, effectively ending the War in Europe;
One week later, on May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered and the Allied Forces declared Victory in Europe;
On July 15, 1945, President Truman arrives on a Sunday afternoon for the crucial Potsdam Conference, scheduled to begin on July 17th.
On July 16, 1945, the US Manhattan Project’s “Trinity Test” of the Atomic Bomb—the first Nuclear Test in world history—was carried out in Alamogordo, New Mexico, 210 miles south of Los Alamos.
The following day, on July 17, 1945, the Potsdam Conference– to negotiate the terms for the end of World War II– began in a Soviet occupied part of Germany, just outside of Berlin. In attendance were Winston Churchill, President Truman, and Soviet Leader Josef Stalin. It was the first time Truman met either Churchill or Stalin.
July 24, 1945, Truman tells Stalin at Potsdam that the United States had successfully detonated the world’s first Atomic bomb the previous week;
July 25, 1945, the formal order to use the Atomic Bomb as a weapon of war against Japan was given by Secretary of War Stimson, with President Truman’s approval.
The Potsdam Conference concluded on August 2, 1945. The Soviet Union had not yet declared war on Japan, an important fact to preclude Russia’s designs for expansion in the Far East;
August 6, 1945, the first American Atomic Bomb is dropped on Hiroshima killing 100,000 to 150,000 people;
August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union declares war on Japan, at 11 pm that evening, the night before the second US Atomic Bomb is dropped on Nagasaki, and Russian forces invade mineral rich Manchuria, then under Japanese control;
August 9, 1945, the second American Atomic Bomb—six times the size and strength of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima—is dropped on Nagasaki, killing 80,000-100,000 people.
August 14, 1945, Japan surrenders, ending World War II.
The evidence of the world’s first Nuclear weapons being used as tools to intimidate Stalin and Russia—more than as weapons to defeat Japan—is followed to its logical conclusion by Alperovitz in Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam:
“It might explain why none of the highest civilian officials seriously questioned the use of the bomb as Eisenhower did; for having reversed the basic direction of diplomatic strategy because of the Atomic Bomb, it would have been very difficult for anyone subsequently to challenge an idea which had come to dominate all calculations of high policy…Were Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombed primarily to impress the world (specifically Stalin) with the need to accept America’s plan for a stable and lasting peace?”
Truman’s hand-picked Secretary of State James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, meeting with Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project scientists in May, 1945, told them that it was necessary for the Bomb to be “successful” because “our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe.”
Testifying before Congress some years later, J. Robert Oppenheimer, admitted that the obsession of post-War stability was the “problem” of Russia:
“Much of the discussion revolved around the question raised by Secretary Stimson as to whether there was any hope at all of using this development (of the bomb) to get less barbarous relations with the Russians.”
A few hundred deaths of Americans in proximity to the New Mexico bomb-test site, and the incineration of a few hundred thousand Japanese children, women and men, were, by those cold calculations, simply the inhumane, collateral damage of war, and a world gone completely mad.
Put that in your “Barbieheimer,” press kit and try to make it look courageous or cuddly.
Just a few days after the Confederate State of Florida announced it will start teaching the “benefits” of Slavery upon the enslaved, the Biden/Harris Administration proclaimed it will designate a series of national monuments to honor Emmett Till, the 14-year old Black child tortured, brutalized and lynched by Florida’s fellow White Supremacists of Mississippi, back in 1955.
The announcement came on what would have been Emmett Till’s 82nd birthday, clearly intended as a graphic illustration of the murderous racism and hate that is intertwined into nearly every sinew of American history. It was the equivalent of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris using the pulpit of the Presidency, to reopen Emmett Till’s casket, just like Mamie Till did 68 years ago, to force the world to see the real evil and inhumanity wrought by racial hatred upon her only child.
Stare at the body of that mutilated child, Florida; affix your eyes on the mangled manifestation of your immorality. We won’t let you erase it, nor the brutalization of millions of Black people enslaved, or ensnared in your still-cruel laws and customs, or thrown into camps of mass incarceration–the new, institutionalized face of Jim Crow.
I heard the news about Emmett Till’s national monuments today and first thought that he could have been my child, or my grandchild, since he was murdered at the same tender age that my oldest granddaughter has just reached. How easy, I thought, for my beloved granddaughter–an out, proud Lesbian–to be targeted by hateful people who view her mere existence as a threat.
I heard the news about Emmett Till today, and thought about a 16-year old Black child, Yusef Hawkins, murdered for wandering into an unfamiliar White neighborhood in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, at precisely the “wrong” time, 34 years ago next month, during a long, hot New York City summer.
I worked with New York State’s Governor Mario M. Cuomo at the time, at 2 World Trade Center, when the news assaulted us that a mob of some 30 white men wielding baseball bats chased Hawkins—a young black face in an enclave of mostly white Italian-Americans—and then someone in the crowd shot him to death. Hawkins was innocently responding to a newspaper ad to purchase a used car, and the subway he took to arrive at the location, deposited him in Bensonhurst for the first time—and the last– in his short, beautiful life.
I was sickened by the brutal murder, and outraged at the young Italian tough-guys—John Gotti wannabes—who rushed to tell the tabloid and TV reporters that the “nigger” (their word) had no place in their neighborhood. I kept Cuomo informed all day of the rapidly unfolding events following the murder of Yusef Hawkins, drafted his official response, and knew that we’d be attending the Black child’s funeral in East New York, not far from where I was born.
The Hawkins murder by violent Italian-American punks haunted me for days. I knew these people. I left them behind to fester in their own ignorance, while I pursued a far different life, for a working-class, Italian-American kid. I knew these people, and I used all my strength to escape their grasp. I tried to push them away and out of my memory and experiences, but what good did it all do when a 16-year old Black child was dead?
I detested these wise guys who swaggered around their neighborhoods, swimming in their own ignorant smugness; despised them for their violence and the crimes they committed, and for what they made people think of us, and for how little they made us think of ourselves.
I blamed myself for Yusef Hawkins’ death, because, somehow, in my desperation to get out, to get away, I lost sight of how I might have changed some other life like mine; shown another young Italian-American kid struggling with his identity and place in the world, that there were avenues of education and compassion to escape from all of our own personal Bensonhursts.
Yusef Hawkins was my own child—just two years older than my own son, who too, was without guile, and trusting of other humans, regardless of race or background or neighborhood. Yusef was a child of the City which took his life, and no matter how hard I scrubbed, I could not get his blood off my hands.
So, I cannot think about children like Emmet Till without thinking of Yusef Hawkins, and of thousands upon thousands of others like them, who wander into a world of hostility and hatred, and cannot, like many of us, comprehend the depths of the heart of darkness.
(At the nearly 100-year old Chapin Family compound in Andover, New Jersey, Tom Chapin—Harry Chapin’s younger brother, and— a singer/songwriter/activist and Grammy Award winner in his own right, ponders the photo of his brother Harry (center, on mantlepiece) and the painting of his maternal grandfather, the 20th Century literary giant Kenneth Burke, or K.B., as he was called. The portrait of Kenneth Burke, with the old manual typewriter at his shoulder, was painted by Tom and Harry’s paternal grandfather, James Ormsby Chapin, a prominent depression-era folk artist.)
( Photo & Story by Steve Villano, Copyright, 2021)
(This month marks the 42nd Anniversary of the death of Harry Chapin, and the interest in this unique life of an American musician, artist and citizen activist continues to grow. I’ve written much about Harry Chapin, and had the distinct pleasure of working on the documentary entitled “When In Doubt Do Something,” about his life with Producer Rick Korn, and Harry’s son, Jason Chapin. Yet, what frequently gets overlooked by the focus on Harry’s music and his family’s continuing fight against poverty and food insecurity, is the fascinating story of the generations of Chapin (and Burke) history-makers which came before him. Here is part of that story:
Harry Chapin’s life was, at it’s core, a love story — a complicated, triangulated, convoluted, undisputed, multi-generational, non-denominational, big-brotherish, earth-motherish, Bohemian-maniacal, Yankee Puritanical, serendipitous, so ridiculous love story that it could just as well have been fiction, or the subject of one of Harry’s own story songs. But, it was a love story as real as life, with roots as deep as roots can reach, and lots of reminders that it happened, and was not just imagined.
It’s a story that dates back decades, into generations and centuries, back in time before there was a country to be part of, or proud of, but not before there were some things that mattered so much, everything would be risked.
It began, as many love stories do, with some headstrong romantic infatuated with the notion that, somewhere, there was a better life than the one he or she was living, and that something — anything —needed to be done to bring it about. That headstrong romantic was not Harry.
Unlike Frank Sinatra, who came from a family of poor immigrants, during a time of virulent anti-Italian and anti-immigrant fervor in the United States, Harry Chapin was born of American bluebloods — White Anglo Saxon Protestants who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony just two decades after the first African Slaves were dragged in chains to the Commonwealth of Virginia.
The risk-taking romantic in the Chapin family was Harry’s great grandfather to the ninth generation, Deacon Samuel Chapin, who escaped England in the 1600’s with his wife and lover Cicely, to be free from religious persecution. Deacon Sam Chapin became one of the founders of Springfield, Mass., where — in one of the first colonies to abolish slavery in America — former slaves knew they would find a welcoming haven, just across the border from Connecticut, an early slave-holding state.
Unlike Bruce Springsteen, who grew up in a working-class enclave of Freehold, New Jersey, or Elvis Presley, whose parents and grandparents were dirt poor in Tupelo, Mississippi, or Billy Joel, with whom he shared a musical legacy passed on by their fathers, the social, intellectual and political skills of Harry Chapin’s ancestors put them among the elite of American culture. To them, the Mayflower was a means of transportation, not an historic old New York hotel, nor a moving truck on US highways.
Harry’s maternal grandfather, Kenneth Burke, authored 15 books, and among students of language, was considered a literary and linguistic giant for most of the 20th Century. In 1981, the year Harry died, “KB”, as family members called him, won the National Medal for Literature, at 84 years old.
Burke brought the practice of the literary & artistic salons, made famous by Virginia Wolfe and the Bloomsbury Writers in London, Gertrude Stein in Paris, or Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table in New York, out to a 165-acre family compound in Andover, New Jersey—still used by the Chapin family– he purchased with the proceeds from a $2800 literary prize he won in 1928.
There he entertained writers, artists and philosophers from around the world, giving them space and freedom to work on their craft and discuss it, while he did the same. That kind of laboratory for creativity and learning, and a passion to do something that mattered, even if it didn’t pay well, was not lost on Harry Chapin, nor his brothers, who spent endless summers of their youth barefoot and sometimes bare-bottomed in the Walden-like environment at Andover.
In fact, it was KB’s daughter Eleanor’s husband, Ricky Leacock, the great documentary film maker and inventor of the art of Cinema Verite and a colleague of such giants of documentary filmmaking as D.A. Pennebaker and Albert & David Maysles , who perfectly captured the atmosphere of Andover in a short film featuring the young Chapin boys, and their male cousins, entitled The Barebottom Tribe. Few other families could boast that one of them was a legendary filmmaker making home movies, but that was the milieu in which the Chapins and the Burkes came of age.
During some of the most tumultuous times for intellectuals, writers and artists in the United States in the 1930’s, 1940’s and early 1950’s — at the peak of Red-baiting and anti-Communist hysteria — Burke hosted writers like Malcolm Cowley, Jon Dos Passos, Shirley Jackson (author of the later-banned short story The Lottery), and Ralph Ellison; poets William Carlos Williams and e.e. cummings, and artists like Alexander Calder, and a local scenic and portrait painter and illustrator named James Ormsby Chapin, who did some design work for The Dial Magazine, which Burke edited.
Shortly before his book The Invisible Man was published(Random House, NY, 1952), Ralph Ellison sat on Kenneth Burke’s piano bench at the main house in Andover, and as KB’s son Michael Burke recalled, read excerpts from his incendiary book on race relations in the United States:
“Ellison sat on KB’s bench, and I was mesmerized as he read from the chapter where he described young Black men boxing bare-chested for the entertainment of the wealthy, White elite of the community, “ Michael Burke said.
Toward the end of the chapter, the winning, young Black boxers were forced to jump for coins tossed onto an electrified carpet by the inebriated, inhumane White men, who found entertainment in the young Black men’s suffering. Each coin the young Black athletes touched sent an electric shock through their bodies until, as Ellison wrote, “ I saw one boy…his back glistening with sweat like a circus seal…landing flush upon the charged rug, heard him yell and saw him literally dance upon his back, his elbows beating a frenzied tattoo upon the floor, his muscles twitching like the flesh of a horse stung by many flies.”
On other days, Michael Burke, who became like an older brother to Harry Chapin, would hear William Carlos Williams read his poetry, or use the hand-shaped, wire toilet-paper hold made by Alexander Calder, with the middle finger extended to hold the roll of paper. Andover, and the literary world Kenneth Burke nurtured, was a remarkable, Renaissance-like, place, and for the Chapin brothers it was an endless summer camp.
“It was an ever shifting feast of people, all kinds of people “ Princeton historian Sean Wilentz said of Andover, where he spent some time as a child. Wilentz, the author of books on Ronald Reagan, Andrew Jackson and five other history books — and one of the country’s foremost authorities on Bob Dylan (Bob Dylan in America, Anchor Books, NY, 2010) — grew up right behind the Chapin/Harts in Brooklyn. His family ran the 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, and his father Elias Wilentz, who edited The Beat Scene —an early anthology of Beat poetry — was a drinking buddy of Kenneth Burke’s.
“There was a whirwind of activity there, “ Wilentz said, “and all of this was going on in this sylvan, beautiful rural atmosphere — in the middle of nowhere. It was a Bohemian, but very loving environment. In that family, everybody got divorced, but no one ever left. When you were welcomed in by them, you knew you were loved.”
Those “sylvan, beautiful rural” mountains of New Jersey also appealed to James Ormsby Chapin as an escape from the highly commercialized New York City art world, which he detested. A close friend of the poet Robert Frost’s for three decades, Harry’s paternal grandfather illustrated Frost’s first book of poetry, North of Boston, in 1917. The following year, in 1918, a serendipitous encounter on a NYC subway train between James Ormsby Chapin and his former high school teacher, Abigail Forbes, led to the two dramatically different personalities getting married.
James Ormsby Chapin not only did illustrations for Robert Frost and Kenneth Burke, he designed several covers for Time Magazine and become one of the most accomplished depression-era artists of his time, with his haunting depictions of people enduring the hardships of life, inspiring painters of the caliber of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Decades later his grandson Harry would be so deeply influenced by his painting, that the younger Chapin’s story songs seemed as if they simply put lyrics to the lives of the beaten down individuals James Ormsby Chapin captured on his canvases.
Many resembled the people Harry Chapin encountered years later in Flint, Michigan, when he gave benefit concerts there for Michael Moore’s Flint Voice, and may have explained the deep connection they felt for each other. However, the marriage between the distinguished and proper Victorian schoolteacher, and the much younger bohemian artist was not nearly as enduring as James Ormsby Chapin’s art. Their marriage lasted only two years, with Abby Forbes giving birth to one son, James Forbes Chapin, who would later become the father of Harry Chapin, and his brothers James, Tom and Steven.
Serendipity seemed to be the stuff of life for the Burkes and Chapins. In the mid-to-late 1930’s, several years before Harry was born, James Ormsby Chapin took a teaching fellowship at the Summer Art Institute of Claremont College in Southern California. While there, he walked into a small sportswear shop and in another act of kismet similar to how he met Abby Forbes on the NYC subway, and how, years later, Harry would meet Sandy Gaston Cashmore when he showed up at the front door of a Brooklyn brownstone to give her guitar lessons, the talented portrait artist recognized the young, lithe Mary Fisher from one of his art classes and was smitten when he saw her amidst the delicate dresses she sold. He told Mary he wanted to paint her portrait, and by August, 1937, they were married in Pasadena, California.
The artist Chapin and his new wife, moved back east and into an old barn on Kenneth Burke’s sprawling Andover compound where they lived and Big Jim painted. When his grown son James from his marriage to Abby Forbes visited Big Jim and Mary at the Burke compound, James — already a musician at the age of 21 — met Elspeth — Kenneth Burke’s eldest daughter, and later, Harry’s mother — and they immediately fell in love, marrying in 1940.
Mary Chapin, in her unpublished diaries entitled “The Beginnings of Our Life Together,” chronicled the artists and writers who dropped in and out of Andover, and called life at the Burke compound “bliss.”
“In the mornings, everyone did his work,” Mary Chapin wrote. “The writers wrote, the painters painted, the comforters (mostly the women) prepared the creature comforts. Jim’s (Chapin’s) easel was set up in the open section of the barn.”
Then Mary, who would open a dress shop in New Jersey before taking off in 1968 to Canada with James Ormsby Chapin and their two sons Elliot and Jed who were avoiding the draft for the Vietnam War, located the thread which stitched all of the Burkes and Chapins together:
“In the case of the Burke household, not even the problem of the broken family was going to do them damage. In later years, I asked one of their young men how it happened that he had such strong family ties even with the families marital scrambling. He said that he felt as if he just had more people loving him. There was plenty of love.”
Harry Chapin was born into this fearlessly creative, loving, hippie-ish family in 1942 — on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor — and was exposed, from his earliest years, to a world where wealth was measured in the richness of the writing, artistic work and the hurricane of ideas swirling around him, not in dollars. To create, was to be alive, and, with family, all that was necessary for success. The fundamental non-financial values of Harry’s family were not the same of Sinatra’s, Springsteen’s, Elvis’ or even Billy Joel’s, where daily economic survival was essential. To the Burkes and the Chapins, money really didn’t matter.
Harry Chapin, like Pete Seeger, had been blessed with a simple, carefree life, despite members of each of their families — including Seeger himself — being “Blacklisted” for their political activities by rabidly anti-Communist Right Wing public officials. Seeger’s own father, Charles, was forced out of the music department he established at the University of California at Berkeley because of his publicly professed pacifism toward World War I. Imagine, being forced out of Berkeley for being a pacifist.
At virtually the same moment Charles Seeger was being booted from Berkeley in 1917, Harry’s great Aunt Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Workers movement, was being physically attacked for her work in the Women’s Suffrage Movement. A journalist who wrote for the Socialist and IWW (International Workers of the World) newspaper The NewYork Call; interviewed historic figures like Margaret Sanger and Leon Trotsky; and was close friends with the playwright Eugene O’Neill, Dorothy Day crusaded against American entrance into World War I, and in favor of Women’s Suffrage.
Day’s work on the movement to secure the right to vote for women nearly got her killed. She joined her friend Peggy Baird Johnson (who would later marry K.B’s best friend, the writer Malcolm Cowley) at a November 1917, Suffragette demonstration in Washington, DC, where Dorothy and Peggy would be arrested along with 46 others and jailed for 30 days.
During her incarceration, Dorothy Day was nearly beaten to death by guards armed with billy clubs in “the worst and most brutal incident of the treatment of the suffragists, where they were dragged, kicked, trampled and choked,” according to Day’s youngest granddaughter, Kate Hennessey, in the comprehensive biography of her grandmother, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty (Scribner, NY, NY, 2017). Three years later, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, securing the right to vote for women.
In sharp contrast to their ancestors, Harry Chapin and Pete Seeger lived charmed lives.
“ I was born into a very easy life in many ways,” Seeger said. “ My parents were professional musicians and when they split up I went to spend vacations with my grandparents who had a private house in the country.”
It’s as if Pete Seeger was foreshadowing the path that awaited Harry Chapin.
While Harry’s grandfather Kenneth Burke was a music critic and understood all the elements of sound, orchestration and lyrics, and his “private house in the country” paralleled that of Pete Seeger’s grandparents, the most likely musical influence for Harry, Tom and Steve Chapin, was their father, Jim Chapin, who became a top drummer with some of the leading musicians of his time, including the Glenn Grey Orchestra and Tony Pastor. He taught and wrote books on drumming, most notably Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer, Volumes I & II,which became, and remains, the essential professional instruction book for most modern drummers, more than a decade after Jim Chapin’s death in 2009.
Jim Chapin’s drumming Techniques book became world famous, but his musical career did not, missing some opportunities to play with the biggest bands of his time.
“Dorsey (Tommy Dorsey) didn’t like his foot,” said Harry’s younger brother Tom, flashing a sweet smile at the memory of his father. “He didn’t hit the base drum hard enough.”
Much later, Tom Chapin would say that his father’s example “provided the joy of music. He was a fun, attractive guy who loved to play. We’d see him on weekends, and the sense of possibility (of a musical career) was there.”
Jim Chapin’s obsession with his music kept him away from his wife Elspeth, and their four sons, and that, as well as his love for other women, contributed to their divorce when Harry was only 6 years old.
But, when Harry, Steve & Tom played as The Chapins in clubs like the Bitter End and the Bottom Line around New York in the mid-to-late 1960’s, their father Jim joined them on the drums, keeping their music a full family affair for a while, underscoring the musical tradition into which the Chapin sons were born.
Harry’s early insights about poverty and hunger came from the brilliant work of Michael Harrington, a friend and colleague of his politically astute oldest brother James, who was active in the Democratic Socialists of America. Harrington’s book, The Other America detailing extensive poverty and hunger in the US (Penguin Books, NY, 1962) seized the nation’s attention when it was published, especially that of President John. F. Kennedy. The book became the blueprint for JFK’s—and later LBJ’s–War on Poverty. It also served as one of the inspirations for the Chapin family’s lifelong fight against poverty and food insecurity. James Chapin, Harry’s oldest brother, would serve as Harry’s political guru and advisor throughout his lifetime and steered him toward making a difference on a single, significant social issue.
Born to privilege and into a family of thinkers and artists, Harry felt compelled to do something about the promise of what he believed America was supposed to be for others not as fortunate as the Chapins. His unapologetic patriotism, and unfettered sense of fairness, would, at roughly the same age, lead him to take the same approach Frank Sinatra took in 1945, at age 30 toward civil and human rights activism.
Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, into a struggling Italian family of immigrants — less than an hour from the Andover compound where the Burkes and Chapins would congregate. Pete Hamill, in his remarkable book about Sinatra entitled Why Sinatra Matters, writes how “music was the engine of Sinatra’s life.” Not so, for Harry Chapin. He was the engine of his own life.
““Having Harry for a brother was like having a steam engine for a brother, “ said his oldest brother James Chapin, during Harry’s memorial service at Grace Episcopal Church in Brooklyn, in 1981, acknowledging the effect he had on everyone who came in contact with him. He would never take “no” for an answer, had boundless energy, and was as relentless in fighting for his social and political causes as he was in pursuing his musical career.
“Harry gave away more than he got, “ said Billy Joel, in an interview in his motorcyle shop in the heart of the Village of Oyster Bay, not far from where the Chapins lived in Huntington. “ He concentrated on helping people, whenever he could, giving his money away to other people, for a cause. He had so much talent, and he used it for other people, not for his own gain.”
“We need Harry now more than ever,” Joel said. “Today, when it’s all about greed, all about selfishness, he’d be nudging the hell out of me, out of everyone, to get involved.”
Yet, his music and his life as an artist, in a family of artists, mattered to Harry as much as his activism and citizenship did.
Harry Chapin’s great gift was to merge the many parts of himself — artist, activist, decent human being, brother, father, citizen — into a sort of one-man movement — “a movement among movements” to paraphrase the great social activist and food insecurity guru Frances Moore Lappe, whose first book, Diet for A Small Planet (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1971) had a profound influence on the Chapin family’s thinking about poverty, hunger, income inequality, and the politics of social change, and whose second book Food First, was funded with a starter grant from Harry.
“He wanted to change the world,” said Big John Wallace, his longtime guitarist, fellow singer, and childhood friend dating back to Brooklyn’s Grace Episcopal Church Choir, where they first sang together.
