No Afghans, no masks, no vaccines? This is what my lifelong if sometimes eye-rolling and irritated
/>allegiance to the old Republican party of my youth has brought me? Fuck that.
“MY” Republicans include: the first guy I ever voted for, Frank Sargent, governor of Massachusetts, who went to MIT and ran a rod and gun shop on the Cape, and signed the Shea Bill which said that no Massachusetts citizen was required to serve in an undeclared war. There were plenty in between, but the campaign I was most involved in was that of my old friend Frank Bond, one of the four founders of the Peregrine Fund and a friend. He was a one- time candidate for governor of New Mexico . He lost to the legendary Good Old Boy Bruce King, who leased the land he ranched on from the Bonds, who were at one time the biggest landowners in New Mexico. (Frank’s mother was a bit of a legend too. She was a power in NM Republican politics, and made news when she successfully opposed McCarthyite loyalty oaths at UNM).
Frank could appear to be rather stuffy, which I think hurt him in relentlessly informal NM. He had perfect WASP credentials – he was schooled at Governor Dummer Academy (!) in Massachusetts. But he also spoke both classical Castilian Spanish and our local argot, and as a teenager hung out with the local lowrider gang. It was touching , at the party to celebrate his life a year after his death, to see these men, now grown old and fat, get up and testify to their lasting friendship. I doubt there was a Republican in the bunch.
Like most “New England ” Republicans, Frank believed in serious conservation. He was not just a P Fund founder – he was on the board of Project Lighthawk and as a rancher deeply involved with Holistic Range Management. Frank supported the Second Amendment, more funding for schools and teachers, and also supported the death penalty. He was an early supporter of Gay Rights and insisted on bringing it up in venues where his advisors would blanch at the idea; He framed it as an issue of simple fairness. What’s not to like?
He had an adobe pigeon loft, designed for him by a Spanish architect- characteristically, he offered to give me the plans. As it cost more than my house I didn’t use it.
Frank died a few years ago. The only living Republican who appears to be worth a shit seems to be Liz Cheney. Maybe I’ll turn Bolshevik and join the SWP, The Trotskyites, in memory of the Huntingtons* and Manny Weiner, South Boston shop steward and rabbi’s son, who was married for a long time to Betsy’s older sister Jane* and was the only communist I know who was not born rich. He could recite the entire Tridentine mass in Latin because he had said the prayers at so many union funerals.
The Huntingtons were a red-diaper family, and remained true to the Trotskyite creed, even the bishop who was also a Godly man.
Mary ran a Trotskyite commune on Beacon Hill with Jane in the 1930s until they got busted by the police for being a house of prostitution (they thought Virginia was the madam when she rolled up in a Packard driven by her Haitian chauffeur Herve). Mary eventually married an Italian Republican politician from New Hampshire. Bets called her family “determinedly downwardly mobile”.
One of the most improbable coincidences in the world: Libby’s mother and Jane Huntington were born the same week and the same neighborhood in Anwei, China,in 1918 and their first photograph, in 1918, has them sharing a baby carriage.
Jane stayed in China until she went to Radcliffe; Patty left when she was 8 after her mother died and her heartbroken father wouldn’t talk about China much.To my shock, Libby came to me bearing the photo of them in their carriage. We put them together for the first time in 72 years; a Berkeley republican and an old anarchist farm woman with a trust fund in Massachusetts. They were curiously similar in manner.
Betsy left the Leftist faith, seriously, in 1956. She was living in Paris then when the refugees from the Hungarian uprising came in. Utterly disillusioned, she became an anarcho-Tory like the rest of us, and could be very funny about the communist platitudes of the rest of the family.
They really were American Mitfords, only without the Fascists…