Social Issues in Song

(426 words)

Spain after empire

Spain in the late 1800s had lost most of its empire, and it soon became a poor and underdeveloped nation. It was a country of rural villages and three major industrial cities. More and more people were going to the cities in search of work because there had been famine due to a drought that hit the country around the end of the 19th century. As more people moved to the cities, a movement began to put more power in the hands of the people who were the workers in the cities.

In the countryside, which was most of the country, the farmland was owned by landowners who would allow some farmers to live on their land as long as they worked the land and sold the crops for a profit for the landowners. When the drought hit, the farmers couldn’t make enough crops to satisfy the landowners, and many farmers were thrown off the fields.

The church as the focus of society

At the same time, the church was the focus in many villages. It provided a place where families grew up, prayed, met others, married, were educated, and sometimes borrowed money. Many of the landowners had family members who were priests or members of the Catholic church hierarchy. Others had family in the military. There were also many aristocrats and people who wanted a monarchy (a king).

Francisco Franco was a young man in the Spanish Foreign Legion in Morocco in 1912. The Spanish were trying to continue their occupation of that area. Because of his leadership, he was moved up through the ranks to brigadier general.

A new government

Franco had always supported the monarchy and the church, and when a leftist government was elected to power in 1931, it removed the monarchy and replaced it with a Spanish Republic. A republic has an elected or nominated president rather than a king. The new Spanish government wanted to bring Spain into the 20th century and to bring about reforms to help the people, for example, to offer education that was not only provided by the church in order to allow more free thinking.

Within the Republican government, there were many groups that were competing for power. In Catalunya and Valencia in the northeast, Anarchists, Socialists, and worker’s unions were powerful. In Madrid and other areas, Socialists, Communists, and representatives from the unions held many positions in the government. However, each group had its own beliefs about how the country should be run. This led to serious disagreements among the various groups.

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Vocabulary

famine 飢饉

drought 旱魃

satisfy を満足させる

priest 聖職者

hierarchy 階級

aristocrats 貴族

monarchy 君主国

Spanish Foreign Legion (外人部隊)

occupation 占領

leftist 左翼の

reform 改正

Anarchist 暴力的破壊者

Socialist 社会主義(者)

union 労働組合

Communist 共産主義者

(581 words)

The civil war begins

Franco now had control of the Spanish military, and in 1936, he led a rebellion against the new government. The Civil War was now between the Republicans (those who wanted a more modern economic system and more freedom) and the Nationalists (those who wanted to maintain the monarchy and the Spanish way of life up until then). As the Nationalists moved little by little through Spain taking more territory, the Republic government asked for help (guns and planes) from France and England, but both refused. Franco received military equipment and planes from Hitler’s Germany and from Mussolini in Italy. Portugal allowed weapons and troops to pass through to Spain.

Women fighters

The Republican militias included both men and women who fought equally in the front lines of combat, especially at the beginning of the conflict. Women were trained in weapons, helped with shipping cargo, and operated machine guns in battle, yet many suffered sexist attitudes from the male soldiers who expected them to do the cooking, washing, and sewing. There were many women who took leadership roles in the Republican military, for example, Aurora Arnáiz, 22, who led the first column into battle to defend Madrid, and Lina Odena, who led soldiers at Granada. Thousands more fought bravely alongside their male counterparts.

The Republic seeks help

The Republic had few resources and limited weapons. The government asked England for help, but they did not want to get involved in a problem that was inside Spain. The U.S. also refused. France did not want to upset England, so it refused as well but allowed arms to be smuggled across its border. Mexico offered some assistance. Finally, the USSR offered to send arms and “military advisors” to help. Little by little, the Communists became stronger. The government was not in a position to refuse military help, but this imbalance led to further disagreements within the Republic’s government. As the Republican troops began to lose territory to the Nationalists, the USSR realized the Republic could not win and stopped sending aid.

The war ends

In 1938, the Nationalist forces finally captured Catalunya in the northeast and soon after, Madrid in the center of the country. Refugees tried to escape the country by going to France and other countries. Eventually, Franco’s forces took control of all the territories in Spain, and Franco made himself the country’s leader. He was called “El Caudillo,” the Chief. Only one political party was allowed under the Franco regime, the Falange. Opponents to the government were put in prison. Using a language other than Castilian Spanish in official documents and was not allowed. This included names which had to be written in their Spanish forms rather than Catalan, for example.

Franco had more that 190 concentration camps built to hold prisoners of war. The Republicans who opposed the takeover of the elected government, homosexuals, and other people that the Franco government declared were criminals. According to some estimates, as many as half a million prisoners were held in these camps.* Those who the authorities thought could not be “recovered” (i.e. trained into agreeing with the Franco regime) were shot.

The end of the dictatorship

Franco brought up the next king, Juan Carlos, who he appointed to take over for him after Franco died. Franco remained in power until his death on 20 November 1975. After Franco died, King Juan Carlos was reinstated as Spain’s King, and he began changes to establish a full democracy in Spain.

*Beevor, Antony. The Battle for Spain. The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, 2006. Penguin Books.

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Vocabulary

rebellion 反乱

sexist attitudes  (特に女性に対して)性差別主義の考え方

smuggle 密輸入

refugees 難民, 避難民

concentration camp 強制収容所

prisoner 受刑者

criminal   犯罪者

estimate   見積もる, 概算する, 推定する

Summary:

The Right (known as Nationalists or rebels) were armed and equipped by the countries of Germany and Italy. They were led by General Francisco Franco and were supported by wealthy landowners, industry, the Catholic Church, who all wanted to keep Spain’s traditional values, and the Falange (the official state political party during the Franco era).

The Left (known as Loyalists or Republicans), received support from the Soviet Union and somewhat by Mexico and France, which allowed arms to cross its border into Spain. The Republican troops were made up of workers, peasants (people who worked on the land), trade unionists, Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, and the International Brigade of volunteers from 53 countries around the world. At the beginning of the conflict, women were trained and fought together with male soldiers.

Under Franco’s dictatorship, however, many people suffered. True, there was not as much hunger as there was during the transitional Republic, but there were harsh punishments for talking against the Franco regime.

(525 words)

Slaves from the African continent were first brought into the United States in 1526. From that time through the Civil War (1861-1865), there were hundreds of planned revolts. In the 1800s, at least 100,000 slaves escaped to Canada and other countries. By the 1800s, slaves were being converted to Christianity. Many had come from countries that followed Islam. They were taught songs that reflected the Christian religion. Slaves used these songs to show their resistance to their human slavery. For hundreds of years, the southern states, as well as many northern states, depended on slave labor to make huge profits from the agricultural products they grew. Gradually, the south lost power inside the government. Many southern landowners were afraid that the government might support abolitionists (people who wanted to stop slavery). Others did not want the government to tell each state what they could or could not do.

If the southern states became an independent country, the policies of slavery could continue. Some people in these states took over U.S. government buildings such as post offices and military forts. Lincoln sent military troops to stop this, and the war began in 1861.

The Civil War, fought between northern states (The Union) and the southern states (The Confederacy - a confederacy means a group of like-minded people) was, essentially, a war about economics and the issue of slavery. The southern states were dependent upon free slave labor to work in their fields. During the 1800s, cotton was a crop that could be sold all over the world at good prices. A few landowners in southern states like Mississippi and Alabama got rich by selling their cotton but not having to pay their workers. At one point, the southern states had the 4th largest economy in the world.

In the south, the new southern government, the Confederate States of America, started a draft system to get soldiers to fight. However, if you owned 20 or more slaves and could pay someone to take your place, you didn’t have to fight. If you didn’t, you had to fight, even though you didn’t have much to gain from the war.

Along with the hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed in battle came disease. Many deaths on both sides occurred from diseases that could not be cured on the battlefields. Soldiers also faced the lack of food, bad weather in the south, and the lack of supplies. Thousands of women and children left their homes to try to find food for their families. People in the southern states faced these and many other problems on a daily basis.

In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a law which basically banned slavery in the south. After the war ended in 1965, the southern plantation owners paid high taxes and lost a lot of their property. Those who still had cotton fields hired poor workers—black and white—as sharecroppers to work in the fields. The owners paid very little, and the workers could only buy things at the company store, often on credit. This meant that the workers were always in debt to the owners and could not be free economically.

VOCABULARY

revolt 叛乱

convert 改宗する

resistance 抵抗

plantation 植え込み

sharecropper 小作人

(809 words)

Jim Crow laws were still in place throughout many parts of the U.S. in the 1950s. This meant that on the basis of the color of their skin, people were separated in public transportation, schools, parks, and other public facilities. Black people were treated differently and often faced violence for standing up to this unfair treatment.

The Women’s Political Council (WPC) was founded in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1946 by Mary Fair Burks, its first president. The organization received complaint after complaint about the treatment of black people on the city’s buses. The members of the WPC were mostly professional women, professors at the state college, nurses, social workers, principals, and public school teachers, among others. They realized that the white people in the community would not change the treatment of black people on the buses. It would have to be carried out by the black population of Montgomery, and it would take the form of a bus boycott.

As more and more of the women of Montgomery wanted to see the change happen, they joined the WPC. By 1955, there were three chapters of the WPC in three different parts of the city, each with its own president, treasurer, and telephone coordinator. This system was well in place and essential if the boycott was to be successful.

Many black passengers were arrested over the years. In one incident, two children from New Jersey, who were not used to riding on segregated buses, took seats in the white section. When they refused to change seats, they were arrested.

One woman was transferring from another bus, but the driver didn’t accept her transfer and demanded she pay again. She refused to pay the extra fare and got off the bus. The driver got off and began to beat her. The woman was arrested for disorderly conduct. In a different case, a man was shot and killed by the police as he got off the bus after arguing with the driver who said he had not paid his ten-cent fare.

On December 1st, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress, was arrested for not giving up her seat to a white passenger. The black community had had enough, and the WPC was ready to put the boycott in motion. WPC volunteer Jo Ann Robinson distributed thousands of flyers that asked the community not to ride the buses the following Monday. People gave the notices to their friends and neighbors. Soon, all of Montgomery knew of the plan. In addition, ministers from different churches met and agreed to support the boycott.

Plans had been made for organizing alternative transportation for the thousands of people who had to get to work or school on Monday. People who owned private cars were given instructions on where to go to pick up people. Black taxis were scheduled to work certain areas of the city. Donations poured in to pay for gasoline and car repairs.

Monday morning arrived. The buses rolled out of their garages and into their daily routes, but on this day, there were very few riders, black or white, on the buses. The one-day boycott was a success.

That night, there was a meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church, a building that could hold thousands of people. It was filled to capacity, with thousands more standing outside and lining the nearby streets. Inside, the ministers prayed with the people and asked them if they should end the one-day boycott. Everyone agreed that this was just the beginning, that they would continue until changes were made in the treatment of black citizens on the buses of Montgomery.

Before the meeting ended, the people decided to create a new organization, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) with members of the** clergy **in the core leadership positions. The President of the MIA was a 26-year-old minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He had never led a boycott before, but he had a deep intelligence and strong academic background.

In January of 1956, the white backlash began. The police came down hard on the boycotters. They jailed many drivers for simple things or even fake reasons such as exceeding the speed limit. There were more violent actions as well. Rocks were thrown through the windows of boycott leaders’ homes, and threatening phone calls continued day and night. Dr. King’s house was bombed. The clergy leaders again asked the black community if they wanted to stop the boycott, and once again, the answer was no.

The boycott continued for a total of thirteen months. Eventually, on June 5, 1956, judges decided that discrimination on public buses based on race was unconstitutional. From that day on, all citizens were able to ride the buses and sit where they wanted. There was no violence, and people even smiled at one another as they rode.

Everyone who refused to ride the buses had a hand in making this boycott a success and helped to change attitudes and being part of history.

Source: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, University of Tennessee Press, Ⓒ1987.

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VOCABULARY

treasurer 会計係

disorderly conduct 乱行

ten-cent fare $0.10 料金

donations 寄付

filled to capacity 大入満員

clergy 聖職者

unconstitutional 違憲

(415 words)

Coal miners in the U.S., as in many other countries, were caught in a vicious circle. Children who were born into a mining family often were not able to escape their environment in order to make a better life for themselves and their children. The conditions in the mining camps were confining, and opportunities were limited. In general, the mine owners were concerned with profits, so the company spent little extra on things like sanitary living conditions, health care, education for the children, and most of all, decent wages.

Life in the mining camps and towns was hard. If a small hut was provided for a family, a certain amount of the day’s wages was deducted. If a doctor had to be called to come from the nearest town to care for an injured miner or a family member, that fee, too, was deducted from a miner’s wages. The amount left over was handed over to the wife who took it to the company store, a store owned and operated by the mine owner, and the only store that was available, especially in camps that were located many kilometers from the nearest town. This meant that the goods on sale and the prices were decided by the owner or his representatives.

In many camps, the workers were not paid in dollars. They were paid in something called scrip, pieces of paper that the company issued and that could only be used at the company store. Because the miners’ wages were so low, these workers sometimes had to buy goods on credit, and then they owed the company store. It was difficult for them to pay off their debts, in particular when there were more children in the family to feed. As time went by, the children had to work as well.

As the miners heard about other places where miners had organized. They made a group that stood together and demanded changes in their working conditions. Of course, the mine owner did not want to use more money than was minimally necessary to run the mine, so the owners tried to intimidate the miners and their families. They would hire men to threaten and scare the families, sometimes violently, so that they would give up the idea of forming a union.

However, when the miners and their familes worked together, they found that they had a kind of power in that unity. Singing songs was one way they felt united in their struggle.

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VOCABULARY

vicious circle 悪循環

confining 狭い

sanitary 衛生的な

hut 伏せ屋

deduct 差し引く

minimal ごくわずか

intimidate すごみを利かせる

unity 団結

struggle 闘争

(679 words)

The beginnings

Japan was forced out of Vietnam in 1945 by the Vietnamese, led by Ho Chi Minh. When France took back its former colony, the U.S supported France by sending money and arms. However, after years of occupation, France was spending so much on trying to keep its colony that it decided to leave. U.S. leaders were afraid of “the domino theory”, that if one country in Southeast Asia became communist, others would follow, so it began to send military advisors and, from 1965, soldiers.

In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy continued the American policy in Vietnam. Because the Vietnamese fighters knew their territory and were able to hide in the jungles, in 1964, Kennedy began the use of chemical defoliation (also known as Agent Orange) to make it more difficult for Vietnamese soldiers to fight the U.S. troops. Millions of Vietnamese and thousands of American soldiers were exposed to the chemical weapon which caused cancers and birth defects.

Students teaching students

Lyndon Johnson began bombing North Vietnam in 1965. From that year, hundreds of thousands of students on high school and college campuses started “teach-ins.” These meetings were held in school classrooms where students debated and learned about the U.S. role in Indochina.

Protest starts

There was strong opposition to the war, particularly on the part of black people within the civil rights movement. Many saw parallels between the violence being used against the people in Vietnam with the violence black people experienced throughout the U.S. south. Protest in the streets began, and from 1964 into the 1970s, millions of people of all ages and races, including lawyers, nuns and priests, school children and professors, marched against the war.

The draft begins

In order to have enough soldiers to fight in the war, the U.S. government had a policy of selective service, or, the draft. Thousands of young men between the ages of 18 and 26 were called to serve in the military. There were exceptions, though, to who would serve. If you were a father, you did not have to serve. Depending on your employment, you could be given a deferment, meaning you didn’t have to go into the service right away.

Because few black men had graduated from college and faced a limited choice of jobs due to discrimination, most were not eligible for deferment. Also, more blacks passed the physical examinations. One reason is that often these young men did not have access to medical care, so they did not have the medical records that might have resulted in a deferment. Blacks were drafted in higher numbers than whites. In 1964 alone, 30.2% of blacks compared with 18.8% of whites were called into military service (Murray, 1971). Later on, because more men were required to fight, more whites had to be called up. The government was reluctant to draft young white college students, so they lowered the acceptable mental test requirements, and this meant more black men would be eligible to serve.

The war escalates

On 30 January 1968, North Vietnam launched the “Tet Offensive”, an attack on South Vietnam, including the capitol, Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). It changed Americans’ view of the war. Eugene McCarthy ran for president as a candidate supporting peace against Richard Nixon. John F. Kennedy’s brother, Robert, also entered the presidential race but was killed on June 6. Nixon won the election, and he expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos. More and more university students protested against the war. At Kent State University in 1970, the Kent city mayor called the National Guard to stop the protesters. The guardsmen opened fire and shot and killed 4 students and wounded 9 others. The war continued until 1975.

Protest music

Music about the war was not only an American product. People from many countries around the world wrote music about the war. Vietnamese in both North and South Vietnam wrote songs. Many of their songs were patriotic and tried to encourage the people to fight for South Vietnam or against the American invaders in the North.

NOTE: Wiki Commons has some information about the photo above:

Melvin Morris and a fellow Soldier take time to pose for a photo taken in South Vietnam. More than 40 years since serving on a heroic mission in South Vietnam, Morris will receive a Medal of Honor initially denied to him because he was black.(Photo courtesy Melvin Morris)

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VOCABULARY

colony 植民地

advisors 軍事顧問

chemical defoliation 化学的落葉

eligible 適格

reluctant 気が向かない

National Guard 国防軍

patriotic 愛国的

invader 侵略者

Sources

Franklin, H. Bruce. The Vietnam War: In American stories, songs, and poems. Bedford Books, 1996.

Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A history. Penguin Books, 1984.

Murray, P. T. (1971). Blacks and the Draft: A History of Institutional Racism. Journal of Black Studies, 2(1), 57–76. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2783700

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. Perennial Classics, 2001.

Zinn, Howard. “The Impossible Victory” in Against the Vietnam War: Writings by Activists, edited by Mary Susannah Robbins, Syracuse University Press, 1999.