Heroic News #1 Carlos Bulosan
Heroic News no. 1: Carlos Bulosan
Carlos Bulosan was a Filipino poet, essayist, worker, and activist for the working class and the Filipino American community who emigrated to the United States in 1930 when he was 17. The Philippines that Bulosan grew up in was deeply impacted by American involvement. The United States colonized (ie. bought from the Spanish, invaded, and took over) the Philippines after the ending of the Spanish American War in 1898.
To give you a general sense of what life was like in the Philippines during American colonization at the turn of the 20th century, we gathered up many civilians into “reconcentration camps,” which are exactly what they sound like, in an attempt to stop an armed rebellion against American control. Many people were impoverished and there was severe economic inequality. In any colony, wealth is concentrated in the hands of the colonizing power. Bulosan writes about his family having to pawn their land–which they still had to work–to make ends meet during the toughest of times.
While Bulosan wasn’t born during the time of concentration camps and armed rebellion, he lived a life in the Philippines fully under American imperial control. When he emigrated to the United States in 1930, many jobs were not open to him due to his status as an immigrant and a person of color. He worked various odd jobs to survive, including working in factories, canneries, agricultural labor, and as a service worker in hotels. All the while, Bulosan tried to make it as a writer. Sadly, for the majority of his life, he lived in poverty and struggle. He died in 1956 after a prolonged struggle with tuberculosis. It’s generally believed that his health suffered tremendously from violent racist attacks as a labor organizer and struggling worker, living near-starvation, and the lasting impacts of poverty on one’s body.
So why are we talking about a young poet who, for much of the 20th century, was largely forgotten? Because Bulosan contributed an important, critical angle to the cultural mythmaking of America at a time when that myth was still very much in flux. Think about the America that Bulosan saw when he arrived here in 1930. We were right at the start of one of the worst economic depressions the world has ever seen–with America at the epicenter. Poverty was rampant. People were hungry, tired, sick, and previous ways of life were now gone. Our national story of acceptance, abundance, prosperity, and possibility was looking more and more like a fairy tale. We also were not the world superpower that we are today, a title that didn’t emerge until after WWII. We needed a national myth that went beyond our cultural imagination and into our hearts and, most importantly, our bellies and wallets.
In his Jan. 6th, 1941 state of the union address of his historic third term, President Roosevelt (FDR) gave one of the most significant and memorable speeches ever by a president. In this speech, commonly known as the “Four Freedoms” speech , FDR laid out a vision of America that not only served to etch the myth of the nation into stone but also later became the bedrock of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In response to much of Europe’s involvement in WWII, and a growing sense that this world war would soon involve the United States, FDR envisioned a world founded on four fundamental freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. This world, FDR said, “ is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.” Eleven months later, almost to the day, the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor and the US was firmly entrenched in WWII.
In the years following this monumental speech, The Saturday Evening Post, one of the longest-running magazines in our nation’s history, turned to Norman Rockwell, perhaps the greatest mythmaker we’ve ever had, to carry FDR’s vision forward and grow support for the war. Rockwell captured in art what FDR captured in policy, speeches, and the functions of government. By 1943, Rockwell was already established as America’s most prominent illustrator who was able to see–and create–both the realistic and idealized America. His paintings regularly focused on the common person, the worker, the child, the soldier, the mother, the boy scout. He is Americana. Rockwell painted four paintings that corresponded with each of FDR’s “freedoms” for the Post in 1943. These paintings, particularly “Freedom From Want,” became some of Rockwell’s most iconic works that lives on today in many, many parodies and reproductions.
*Record Scratch* Enter (at this time) struggling labor organizer and poet Carlos Bulosan. One of his first, and possibly his biggest, publications was an essay for The Saturday Evening Post commissioned as part of a series to accompany each of Rockwell’s “Freedoms” paintings. The Post bought his essay “Freedom from Want” for $1,000, which would have been a large sum for a struggling writer in the 40’s. What makes this essay such a remarkable chapter in the story of America’s myth is Bulosan’s unwillingness to overlook the injustices that plagued our nation and defied our ideals at home while we fought for those same ideals abroad.
Bulosan did not view the noble ideals espoused by FDR and enshrined by Rockwell as dead, non-existent, or problematic. Instead, he recognized the immense power that exists in the idea of America and the power of these four freedoms. He also saw that, just as those freedoms were under threat in Europe by Nazi forces, they were under threat here at home for many Americans–people of color, immigrants, laborers, the poor, the homeless, the hungry. He turned our gaze, momentarily, inward to spotlight those who are most marginalized in our society. Bulosan didn’t see himself in Rockwell’s painting and FDR’s speech. His community and his friends were not living a life that was free from want or with free speech or freedom from fear. Just as FDR envisioned the Four Freedoms as the basis for “a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation,” Bulosan envisioned the Four Freedoms as the basis for an America that was attainable in his time and generation.
In two short paragraphs, Bulosan characterizes precisely the duality of our nation. The first gives us the not untrue, but idealized, Rockwell-like image of America:
“If you want to know what we are, look at the men reading books, searching in the dark pages of history for the lost word, the key to the mystery of living peace. We are factory hands, field hands, mill hands, searching, building, and molding structures. We are doctors, scientists, chemists, discovering and eliminating disease, hunger, and antagonism. We are soldiers, Navy men, citizens, guarding the imperishable dream of our fathers to live in freedom. We are the living dream of dead men. We are the living spirit of free men.”
The second grounds that idealized world in a harsh reality overlooked by Rockwell, FDR, and America at large:
“We are bleeding where clubs are smashing heads, where bayonets are gleaming. We are fighting where the bullet is crashing upon armorless citizens, where the tear gas is choking unprotected children. Under the lynch trees, amidst hysterical mobs. Where the prisoner is beaten to confess a crime he did not commit. Where the honest man is hanged because he told the truth.”
I can’t imagine Rockwell anticipated “lynch trees” to appear associated with his work. But this, as Bulosan points out, is the real America. It is an America where those Four Freedoms, four beautiful, powerful, commendable concepts, concepts that define our nation, are not experienced by everyone.
And so we have Carlos Bulosan at the end of a chain of events that starts with a speech by perhaps our most famous president, FDR, and climaxes with paintings by “America’s Artist,” Norman Rockwell, for what was at the time the definitive magazine of our country, The Saturday Evening Post, coinciding with one of the most tumultuous decades in American history when we were in dire need of an injection of patriotism. Each of these names is rightfully iconic in the national imagination of America. Except, of course, for Carlos Bulosan.
Bulosan had every reason to hate America–from his past as a colonized subject to his present as a marginalized worker suffering racist attacks and unequal treatment in the workplace. Instead, he loved it more deeply than most. He loved it so much that he worked tirelessly to change it for the better. His writing pulled back the imaginary mythical curtain of America, exposing all of the injustices and inequality, in service of the idealized nation, not in hatred. He pushed us to make the myth of America the reality. If that isn’t a true patriot, a true mythmaker, I don’t know what is.
