Cancel Culture Targets Of Mice and Men—Again

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America’s cancel-culture movement has caught up with the school district of Newfane, the rural community in upstate New York where a student named Madison Woodruff complained recently about having to read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the 1937 novella-play in which the writer explored racism, sexism, and ageism in rural California 100 years ago. A February 2, 2021 report in the Lockport Union Sun & Journal gives the 16-year-old’s reason for objecting to a book that might make her “uncomfortable”: “My main concern is that kids are feeling uncomfortable, and I feel uncomfortable, and I feel if you’re reading a book in school, where school is supposed to be a safe place, you can’t make kids feel uncomfortable because of a book we’re reading.” Citing the December 2020 decision by school district officials in Mendota Heights, Minnesota to remove Of Mice and Men (“the second most frequently banned book in the public school curriculum in the 1990s”), following complaints by parents and staff at Henry Sibley High School, the report quotes Newfane’s high school principal statement in response to Woodruff: “literature is a way to ‘confront’ bigotry.”

Like Shakespeare, John Steinbeck Can Create Discomfort

nick-taylorAlso quoted in the article is Nick Taylor, director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies and professor of English at San Jose State University, who defended Steinbeck’s right to be candid and the reader’s right to be uncomfortable. “She’s absolutely justified in having these feelings,” said Taylor: “I think Steinbeck would’ve said she was completely justified, though he would’ve added, ‘And that’s entirely my point.” Two days after the report appeared, the paper published a letter from a former student who credited her Newfane English teacher with introducing her to another comfort-challenging author: “I always felt safe in school no matter what our assignment was. I had a brilliant English teacher and when I was Madison’s age he introduced us to Shakespeare, who wrote comedies, tragedies, sonnets and poems, and historical works. Shakespeare is the most-recognized playwright in the world. His works could make you feel uncomfortable if you chose to interpret them that way.”

Lead photo: Lon Cheney and Burgess Meredith as George and Lenny in Lewis Milestone’s 1939 film version of John Steinbeck’s 1939 classic. Photo of Nick Taylor courtesy Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.

Supreme Court “Declines to Get Involved” in John Steinbeck Family Dispute

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According to a report from the Associated Press, “The Supreme Court is leaving in place a decision awarding the late John Steinbeck’s stepdaughter $5 million in a family dispute over abandoned plans for movies of some of Steinbeck’s best-known works.” On October 5 “the high court said it would not take up the dispute involving the Nobel Prize-winning author’s stepdaughter Waverly Kaffaga, his late son Thomas Steinbeck and his daughter-in-law Gail Steinbeck.”

This outcome was predicted by observers following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a vigorous advocate for extending creative copyright protections beyond existing limits. For readers unfamiliar with the background of the story, here is the full text of the AP report:

The author of “The Grapes of Wrath” died in 1968 and legal wrangling among his heirs has continued for decades. When he died, Steinbeck left the vast majority of his estate to Kaffaga’s mother Elaine, his third wife. Each of his two sons got $50,000. Legal wrangling ensued and has continued despite agreements between the parties over royalties and control of Steinbeck’s works. In the case the Supreme Court declined to get involved in, Kaffaga alleged that Thomas Steinbeck and his wife had continued to claim various rights in Steinbeck works despite losses in court. That, she said, led multiple Hollywood producers to abandon negotiations with her to develop screenplays for remakes of “The Grapes of Wrath” and “East of Eden.” A jury in Los Angeles awarded her a total of $13 million and an appeals court upheld the verdict in 2019 but struck down $8 million in punitive damages.

Photograph courtesy of the New York Times.

How Will Justice Ginsburg’s Death Affect Adaptations of Works by John Steinbeck?

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The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18 raised red flags on issues of personal concern to Americans who admired Justice Ginsburg’s liberal stance on reproductive and voting rights, gun violence, and affordable health care. Less obvious in the welter of pending challenges to current practice before the U.S. Supreme Court is the potential impact of her passing on the impersonal subject of intellectual property and copyright law—an area in which Justice Ginsburg’s support for extending creative-copyright protection sometimes put her at odds with fellow liberals on the court like Stephen Breyer. Describing her as “hawkish when it came to copyright [law],” a September 21 Hollywood Reporter post by Eriq Gardner—“A Supreme Court Without RGB May Impact Hollywood’s Grip on Intellectual Property”—speculates that the replacement of Ginsburg on the court by a less passionate creative-rights advocate may limit “which future copyright cases the Supreme Court decides to take up.” Citing the example of Steinbeck v. Kaffaga, the case “which concerns movie rights to the works of Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck,” the Hollywood Reporter piece suggests that the loss of Justice Ginsburg “likely dampens the prospects of high court review.”

Photo of Justice Ginsburg’s seat draped in black courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court.

 

Thomas Dixon Jr. and Trump: A Memorial Day Meditation

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Like most days recently, my reflections this Memorial Day tend to focus on the failure of John Steinbeck’s vision for America and the rise in racism, militarism, and nationalism fostered by Donald Trump. There’s no doubt in my mind that our current president is unburdened by such reflection—or that Steinbeck, a New Deal Democrat, would despise Trump even more than he did Richard Nixon, whose election in 1968 contributed (I suspect) to Steinbeck’s death at 66. My grandparents were senior members of Steinbeck’s generation and remained divided on the subject of Steinbeck’s president, Franklin Roosevelt—grandmothers for, grandfathers against, arguments not infrequent. All four grandparents grew up in the anti-Reconstruction, pro-segregationist North Carolina that produced Thomas Dixon Jr., a silver-voiced, white-maned white supremacist whose 1902 novel The Leopard’s Spots—published the month John Steinbeck was born—gave rise to the 1915 film Birth of a Nation and to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in 20th century America. The rancid controversy surrounding The Leopard’s Spots and its sequel, The Clansman, was much in the air when Steinbeck was a boy in California. Evidence of Dixon’s remarkable life in North Carolina was everywhere when I was growing up in that state. Memorial Day 2020 seems as good time as any to recall the curious career of Thomas Dixon. After all, he helped birth Donald Trump.

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Dixon’s people were Scots-Irish, English, and German, like Steinbeck’s and mine. His home town of Shelby—in southwestern North Carolina, near the South Carolina line—was on the way to Lake Lure, where my favorite aunt and uncle had a summer place that attracted dozens of relatives, sometimes all of us at once. Dixon’s father was a Baptist preacher-farmer who owned slaves and believed in education, and Dixon entered Wake Forest, my undergraduate school, at the age of 15. A better student than Steinbeck or me, he graduated from college with a master’s degree at 19. At Johns Hopkins he befriended a fellow graduate student named Woodrow Wilson before dropping out to test his talent as an actor in New York. Failing that he went home again, to North Carolina, and enrolled at a law school in Greensboro, O’Henry’s town and the place my parents moved to after I was born. Aycock, my junior high school, was named for the North Carolina governor who became one of Dixon’s friends in high places. My high school—Walter Hines Page—was named for the North Carolina editor who befriended the young lawyer when he was elected, age 20, to the state legislature. Later Page became a partner in the New York firm that published The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman. Dixon became a Baptist preacher, platform lecturer, best-selling author, movie producer, and millionaire. In 1913 Woodrow Wilson became president, and in 1915 he endorsed The Birth of a Nation after Dixon arranged for a private screening at the White House. Dixon died in 1946, three months before I was born. The Flaming Sword, his anti-communist, anti-integration, anti-utopian final novel, was published in 1939, a few months after The Grapes of Wrath.

From Comrades and The Clansman to In Dubious Battle

What’s the connection with John Steinbeck? Comrades: A Story of Social Adventure in California, the novel Dixon wrote and published in 1909 as a critique of the pacifistic, collectivist utopianism of Upton Sinclair, another hyperactive Southerner-turned Californian. Set on Catalina Island in 1898-1901, it satirizes American socialism as a watered-down version of international communism: adherents sing the Marseillaise, anthem of the Paris Commune of 1871, and apostles include sinister subversives with European accents and dreams of domination. In addition to its hero Norman Worth—an anti-Jim Nolan rich-kid who, like the protagonist of Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, succumbs to the pressure to join—Dixon’s cast of characters includes a Jack London-ish poet and spouse who slug it out like a pair of amatory boxers; a religious manic, called Methodist John, who is “forever shouting ‘Glory, Hallelujah’” at meetings; and a skeptic called Truth Seeker, a “human interrogation-point” who asks the right questions and makes the wrong enemies, like Doc Burton in Steinbeck’s 1936 novel. I’ve always wondered about a comment Doc makes to Jim, characterizing communism as “pure religious ecstasy” and communists as “partakers of the blood of the Lamb,” midway through Steinbeck’s story. That seemed odd to me coming from a professional secularist and skeptic like Burton—until I read Dixon’s description, early in Comrades, of a socialist rally in 1900 San Francisco: “Norman turned and looked over the crowd of eager faces—and every man and woman singing with the passionate enthusiasm of religious fanatics—an enthusiasm electric, contagious, overwhelming. In spite of himself he felt his heart beat with quickened sympathy.”

comrades-thomas-dixon-jrDixon the propagandist of lost causes; Steinbeck the psychologist of latent motives. Antithetical in spirit on issues of justice, peace, and equality, they shared a rich, red-letter language, rooted in the King James Bible, that left plenty of room in their prose for poetry. I don’t know if Steinbeck read Comrades or ever met its author. As with Trump, I’m certain he would have hated both if he did. And knowing there’s a lynching coming, I confess that I can’t make myself watch Birth of a Nation all the way to the end. But I’ve read all of The Clansman, and it’s easy enough to imagine Trump’s father Fred, a Ku Klux Klan supporter in 1920 New York—or Trump’s white nationalist supporters in 2020 Charlotte or Charlottesville—responding positively to this passage from The Leopard’s Spots: “In a democracy you cannot build a nation inside a nation of two antagonistic races; and therefore the future American must either be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto.”  These words are worth remembering this Memorial Day. Reading them again, I realize I was right when I worked at Wake Forest 40 years ago and suggested that the portrait of Thomas Dixon Jr. in the library be moved to make way for one of Gerald Johnson, the Wake Forest alumnus who succeeded H.L. Mencken as the voice of iconoclasm at the Baltimore Sun. But that’s a memory for another Memorial Day.

A native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, William Ray graduated from Wake Forest at the age of 20 and received a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at the age of 24. Other than that, he claims no kinship with the ghost of Thomas Dixon Jr.

What Lyndon Johnson and John Steinbeck Overlooked

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For the past two years I have been doing research at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas on the correspondence between John Steinbeck and President Lyndon Johnson about the Vietnam War.  Steinbeck and Johnson were friends and communicated often. Steinbeck even helped write some of Johnson’s only inaugural address. I wondered how two great humanists got dragged into the Vietnam War, which became so unpopular that Johnson—like Steinbeck, a liberal—was forced to drop out of the 1968 presidential race. I also have questions about similar conditions in our time.

For the author of the Great Society, the expansion of the war ended the expansion of programs intended to provide opportunities for minorities, working people, and the poor that President Johnson had fought hard for and persuaded Congress to pass. For the author of The Moon Is Down, it created significant conflict and confused some readers. Steinbeck, who understood the power of informal social networks to address and survive oppression, wrote The Moon Is Down to demonstrate how members of such a network resist occupation by an enemy force in a democracy not unlike the United States.

From the point of view of Steinbeck’s writing of the 1940s, it can be seen that Ho Chi Minh’s mastery of informal networking contributed to North Vietnam’s defeat of the forces of South Vietnam and its American allies. This perception led Steinbeck to ask a critical question: “How could we lose a war against peasant rabble (informal networks) when we had all the modern advantages (formal system)?” There is a disconnect between the apologist who defended Johnson’s Vietnam policy in the 1960s and the advocate who wrote sympathetically about America’s “peasant rabble” in 1930s and their persecution by exploitative agricultural interests holding formal “ownership advantage” in California. Critics turned this against Steinbeck at the time, and it continues to trouble those of us who wonder why Johnson stuck with the policy and Steinbeck defended it.

I am curious to know how two of my favorite Americans, both domestic change agents, got sucked into such an ugly and damaging foreign war. I am also interested to learn what overlooking the lesson of Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and The Moon Is Down—about the power of informal networks—warns us about in our day. From Wall Street to the Arab street, citizen rebellions are organizing organically to overcome oppression and bring about change. As in Johnson’s time, formal systems are responding with overwhelming force that has the opposite of the intended effect. When authoritarian overreach becomes violent and protestors become victims, today’s Tom Joads also say, “I’ll be there.”

Several years ago I wrote about the lessons of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, laying out the theory and practice of the informal networks that I saw there, and which I use in my own work as a consultant. Now I would like to hear from other admirers of Steinbeck and Johnson who share my curiosity about their folly and my concern about our future. Please share your thoughts on the subject in the comment box below.

Photograph of John Steinbeck with Lyndon Johnson courtesy Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.

Before The Grapes of Wrath, Anger in Seminole County

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Richard Grant, the British travel writer who plumbed Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez in the September 2019 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, now sheds light on The Grapes of Wrath—without mentioning Steinbeck’s name—in the October issue of the same magazine. “Rebellion in Seminole County” recounts the populist revolt that swept through parts of the rural South in the environment and aftermath of America’s entry into World War I. In 1915 there were more registered members of the Socialist Party in Oklahoma than New York, and in 1917 a group of Seminole County, Oklahoma tenant farmers who looked and sounded like Tom Joad joined something called the Green Corn Rebellion, an armed insurrection aimed at local draft boards, big-city bankers, and the interventionist Wilson administration in Washington. Among the organizers who eventually served jail time were two of the uncles of Ted Eberle, a former Seminole County commissioner who was interviewed by Grant for the article. “They thought they could overthrow the government and avoid the draft,” said Eberle, though confiscatory interest rates, plummeting land ownership, and corporate-capitalist war profiteering were also factors in the movement. Steinbeck was a curious teenager who read voraciously and thought deeply when blood was spilled in the name of social justice in Oklahoma 100 years ago. Contemporary readers may be forgiven for making a notional connection between the Oklahoma back story of The Grapes of Wrath and the nugget of Oklahoma history brought to light by Richard Grant in the October issue of Smithsonian Magazine, where a brilliant freelancer has enlightened students of Steinbeck for the second time in two months—this time without even mentioning Steinbeck’s name.

Photograph of Ted Eberle by Trevor Paulhus courtesy of Smithsonian Magazine.

Steinbeck Still Stings on Prince Edward Island

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A December 18, 2018 letter to The Guardian (“Farmers become shopkeepers of crops”), from the son of a farmer in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island, cites The Grapes of Wrath to complain that Canadian oil billionaire Robert Irving is abusing family farmers to get his way with local government on land use issues benefiting his agricultural company’s bottom line. “As I read with interest the piece by Shelley Glen [“Serving the greater good”] on Irving’s holding the government and farmers of P.E.I. hostage, capitalizing on our government’s fears and because they believe they are indispensable,” writes Bruce Macewen, “I’m reminded of the words of John Steinbeck in his 1939 masterpiece ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and how chillingly prophetic his words were and are.” The passage from Chapter 19 of Steinbeck’s novel quoted in the letter describes how “farming became industry” in America, dispossessing families of “Irish, Scotch [and] English German” immigrants going back generations, like those on Prince Edward Island. According to a South Florida business website that describes Irving’s family as Maine’s largest landowner and “one of North America’s most secretive business dynasties,” Irving recently paid $11.2 million for an estate in Wellington, Florida, a wealthy enclave located midway between Mar-a-Lago and Belle Glade, a farm community where Big Sugar is king.

Photo courtesy Prince Edward Island Potato Board

José Andrés Takes The Grapes of Wrath Literally

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José Andrés, the Puerto Rican-born celebrity chef and restaurateur known for high-end cooking at expensive addresses, says The Grapes of Wrath inspired World Central Kitchen, the nonprofit organization he founded to feed victims of natural disasters like the fires that ravaged northern California in November. In a December 4, 2018 Washington Post interview, he explained his decision to extend the charity’s reach south, to Baja California, to feed refugees from Central America tear-gassed by the U.S. government and living in temporary housing provided by the city of Tijuana. “In the end, it’s very simple,” he said. “Our motto comes from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. ‘Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people may eat, I will be there.’” José Andrés has been nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.

Road to Recovery for America and Americans Runs Through Alabama

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John Steinbeck’s expression of ambivalence about America and Americans in Travels with Charley proved to be prophetic. In the presidential campaign of 1968, the year Steinbeck died, Richard Nixon co-opted Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace—Nixon’s rival for the Southern white vote—and embraced the anger exemplified by the screaming mothers blocking the path of African American girls on the way to school in Steinbeck’s story. Forging Nixon’s path to the White House through the heart of the Confederacy paved the way for Donald Trump, Wallace and Nixon’s political heir, in 2016. The spring issue of the scholarly journal Steinbeck Review suggests that the road to recovery from Trump began in 2017 with the defeat of Trump’s candidate Roy Moore by Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama, and that John Steinbeck first diagnosed the condition of America and Americans in his 1938 novella-play Of Mice and Men.

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Driving Highway 31 Through George Wallace’s Alabama

Barbara Heavilin, the journal’s editor in chief, lives in northern Alabama and wrote a column recounting the race to replace Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s masochistic Mini-Me, as the junior U.S. Senator from the state. Moore, a Bible-spouting jurist, has an injudicious past, and opponents calling themselves Highway 31 organized money and volunteers around Jones, the federal attorney who prosecuted perpetrators of the Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls less than a year after Travels with Charley was published. “They chose a good title for themselves, for Highway 31 is the old North-South route through the state before the advent of U.S. 65,” Heavilin wrote. “It winds through lovely little Gardendale with its neat rows of crepe myrtles down the center of the median, going through the middle of town, where I live and where the local high school is in pitted battle in the courts, demanding independence from Jefferson County [because it] would bring about a return to a type of segregation.”

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Scaling the “Wall of Understanding” in Of Mice and Men

The editor of Steinbeck Review knew her readers would enjoy the Steinbeck symbolism in her true-life story, which has the advantage over John Steinbeck’s fiction of featuring a known outcome with a happy ending. As shown by the ambiguous conclusions of In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck was dubious about the outcome of political battles in his own day. Doug Jones may have reminded Alabama voters of Atticus Finch, the Alabama lawyer who defends the black man in Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, but heroes and happy endings are sparse in Steinbeck’s fiction, and Of Mice and Men is typical. To the eternal edification of readers with inquiring minds and open hearts, it dramatizes the failings of America—and Americans victimized by poverty, disability, racism, ageism, and misogyny—against the backdrop of fascism, fake science, and the breakdown of world order. Steinbeck described this context as the “wall of understanding,” and the phrase fits perfectly.

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John Steinbeck’s Antidote for Donald Trump’s Toxicity

Conceived with a wall of understanding that encompassed cold war, public corruption, environmental degradation, and anti-immigrant hysteria, the books about America written by John Steinbeck in the 1960s—The Winter of Our Discontent, Travels with Charley, America and Americans—completed the catalog of outrage, abdication, and abuse personified by the cast of characters who animate Of Mice and Men. Our wall of understanding now includes real walls built to bar Mexicans, Canadians, and America’s European allies, adding urgency to our reading of Steinbeck, who saw a dictator when he looked at demagogues like Huey Long during the Depression and despaired when Richard Nixon won in 1968. Donald was around and dodging the draft at the time, but if Steinbeck imagined a disaster like Trump in America’s future before he died he didn’t say so. Instead, he concentrated on symptoms of decline and the curative power of empathy for America and Americans in any age. As Barbara Heavilin reminds us in her encouraging editorial, the road to recovery starts with understanding and runs through Alabama.

We are suspending weekly posts on a temporary basis to pursue a print project requiring our time and attention. We will continue to answer messages, curate comments, and post news of conferences, publications, and opportunities when brought to our attention. Guest-author submissions will be considered in the order they are received once we resume the weekly schedule maintained since SteinbeckNow.com began five years ago. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.—Ed.

Elaine Brown Was Singing John Steinbeck’s Song

Image of Marian Anderson and Elaine Brown with Singing City

If you haven’t heard of Elaine Brown and Singing City, chances are you will beyond this article. Their message of justice and equality is more urgent than ever, and if Brown—not to be confused with Elaine Brown of the Black Panthers, who was also musically inclined—and John Steinbeck never met in the 1940s or 50s, they should have. Both believed in the rights of the individual and the power of art to break down racial and religious barriers. Steinbeck—a lover of music in many forms—made his argument with words. Brown—a music professor at Temple University who formed the interfaith, mixed-race choral group called Singing City in 1948—made hers in song.

If Elaine Brown and John Steinbeck never met, they should have. Both believed in the rights of the individual and the power of art.

Brown and her singers were fearless, touring the Middle East and the Deep South in the waning era of Jim Crow. If a Southern official insisted Singing City’s artists of color had to stay in a “colored” hotel, the white singers would stay there, too. The great African American contralto Marian Anderson (in photo with Brown and Singing City) honored Brown for her work in promoting “diversity and understanding among all people of religious, economic and racial differences.” Other voices joined the chorus of praise as Singing City broke barriers and set a new standard for music in the service of the social vision Steinbeck proclaimed in his writing.

If a Southern official insisted Singing City’s artists of color had to stay in a ‘colored’ hotel, the white singers would stay there, too.

The lives of Marian Anderson and Elaine Brown were examined in a film on Anderson and a talk on Brown presented under the title of “Marian Anderson and Elaine Brown—Breaking Barriers Through Song” at a meeting of the Monterey Peace and Justice Center in Seaside, California on March 11. The PowerPoint presentation on Elaine Brown was given by Lisa Ledin (pronounced Ledeen), Brown’s niece and a public radio voice who has long been involved in civil rights issues, especially in the music world. “My Aunt Elaine’s favorite quote was, ‘Music’s a great glue. It holds us all together,’” said Ledin, who produced two black history radio documentaries that resulted in the book Nelson Burton, My Life in Jazz.

The lives of Marian Anderson and Elaine Brown were examined at a meeting of the Monterey Peace and Justice Center on March 11.

Elaine Brown died in 1997 at the age of 87, having retired from leading Singing City a decade earlier. She knew Martin Luther King, Sidney Poitier, Robert Kennedy, and the legendary Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Eugene Ormandy, and she was influenced by the music educator Herbert Haslam, the composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, and William Sloan Coffin Jr., the CIA case officer-turned-peace-activist who inspired the Doonesbury character Reverend Scott Sloane. Brown subscribed to some of Coffin’s beliefs and lived by two of his most memorable maxims: “I love the recklessness of faith—first you leap and then you grow wings,” and “The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.”

Brown also knew Martin Luther King, Sidney Poitier, Robert Kennedy, and the legendary Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Eugene Ormandy.

Boulanger’s observation on the power of music (“Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for: it has broadened the limits of our sorrowful life, it has lit up the sweetness of our hours of happiness by effacing the pettinesses that diminish us, bringing us back pure and new to what was, what will be, what music has created for us”) fitted Brown perfectly. The recent publication of Lighting a Candle—The Writings and Wisdom of Elaine Brown serves as a reminder that Brown was quotable, too:  “Feel—not just talk. See—not just look. Listen—not just hear. Possess—not just profess.” Passion for justice and music sustained Brown when her husband Hugh was murdered in a Philadelphia parking lot and their daughter died of cancer, and her legacy endures. Singing City has survived and flourished, fielding mixed-race and children’s choral groups in the spirit of its founder.

Lisa Ledin Finds Inspiration in Her Famous Aunt

Image of Lisa Ledin at Monterey Peace Center

Lisa Ledin (photo right) grew up in Marin County, California and on the Monterey Peninsula, where her parents moved when she was 14. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley and worked at radio station KSNO in Aspen before taking the job that she says gave her true satisfaction: announcing and broadcasting classical and black music at WGUC in Cincinnati. Her father died, and when her mother Verna was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease she returned to the Monterey Peninsula to become a caregiver. Like Elaine, Verna was musical. Lisa remembers that although afflicted with dementia, her mother could still sit at the piano and play beautifully. When the two sisters were children, a piano teacher listened to them play and said, “She (Verna) has the talent but she (Elaine) has the discipline and focus.”

Lisa’s two older sisters died while she was caring for her mother, and when Verna passed away the tribute Lisa paid was quoted in a print publication: “With her death comes my rebirth with no regrets. What I have really learned is about my own depth and capacity to love. I’ve become more sensitive to my own mortality and to what matters in the end. Truly loving someone, being aware of beauty and keeping the senses alive helps you appreciate each breath. Some people get that from studying Zen or reading books. I learned it from taking care of my mother.” Lisa adopted a black infant named Erika and resumed her radio career, first at KBOQ in Monterey and now at the NPR affiliate KAZU, where she hosts Morning Edition on Fridays and Weekend Edition on Saturdays. Her melodious voice is a powerful presence for KAZU’s underwriting announcements, and her schedule leaves plenty of time for Erika, a high school student who is continuing the family tradition by singing and dancing.

Ledin went to school in Pacific Grove, and reading Steinbeck was her introduction to the Monterey Peninsula when she was her daughter’s age.

Ledin went to a public school in Pacific Grove, where Steinbeck did much of his writing, and reading Steinbeck was her introduction to the Monterey Peninsula when she was Erika’s age. “My way of acclimating myself to the area was by getting close to Steinbeck,” she recalls. “I read almost everything he wrote, all the novels and stories. I roamed Cannery Row and all the places he wrote about. When my parents drove on the highways and I looked out at the fields and workers, his words came to me—the true character of the region.”

“Steinbeck was a protector of each person’s humanity, like my aunt,” says Ledin. “Elaine felt that regardless of race, religion, rich or poor, laborer or professor, people can come together through music. And I feel Steinbeck believed that about literature”—adding “They were a lot alike that way, Aunt Elaine and John Steinbeck.”