******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
Below you will find an excerpt from Barbara Goldsmith’s 1998 “Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull”. It deals with the unlikely hook-up between Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin with Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in America. Woodhull and her sister put out a magazine called Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly that called for socialist revolution, free love and spiritualist values. As I pointed out in a CounterPunch article, Marxists in the USA were divided between the “Yankee” faction led by her and the “orthodox” faction led by Frederick Sorge and supported by Marx. Sorge and Marx led a drive to expel Woodhull and her comrades that culminated in them capturing themselves. Despite Woodhull’s idiosyncrasies, she was connected to the living pulse of America’s most exploited—the women, the African-Americans and the most militant workers.
In addition to being the first woman to run for president (her running-mate was Frederick Douglass), she and her sister were the first women to own a Wall St. stock brokerage. The excerpt shows how they got their hands on the money to fund the business and to pay for their revolutionary-minded magazine.
It will be immediately obvious that Goldsmith has not written a scholarly book. Since her previous biography was about Gloria Vanderbilt (the great-granddaughter of the patriarch discussed below), you can probably guess that she was writing for the mass market rather than Marxist ne’er-do-wells like me.
Apparently the book was optioned to become a Hollywood movie but nothing came of that until 2017, when Amazon announced plans to make such a film but not based on Goldsmith’s book as far as I can tell. Someone named Ben Kopit is working on the script and I wouldn’t expect much. Maybe the best bet would be for Paul Buhle to do a comic book since he is a Woodhull scholar among his many other assets.
As a mass-market biographer rather than a historian, Goldsmith paints a lurid picture but perhaps one not that remote from the reality. To balance this book, I also received a copy of Mark Lause’s “Long Road to Harpers Ferry: The Rise of the First American Left” that deals with the Yankee left. Mark has also written a book on “Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era” that I am anxious to read.
full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/02/22/victoria-woodhull-and-cornelius-vanderbilt/
_________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
