[Vision2020] Malvina Reynolds: Poetess of Protest

[Gier, Nicholas]

Hail to the Vision!

This was this week's radio commentary/column.  I was inspired to write it by Emily Poor, a DJ at KRFP.  I was fund raising with her last week on the station and she set me straight about who really wrote "Little Boxes."  I always thought it was Pete Seeger.

I also took a trip back on memory lane and found The Seeker's version of "Morningtown Ride" at <www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YP7GCXqdqU>. How square they seem 20 years into the future.

Nick Gier

Malvina Reynolds: The Poetess of Protest

Love is something if you give it away,
Give it away, give it away.
Love is something if you give it away,
You end up having more.

"The Magic Penny" by Malvina Reynolds

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one 
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

--"Little Boxes" by Malvina Reynolds

They've got the world in their pocket,
They can shake it, they can rock it,
They can kick it for a goal.
They've got the world in their pocket,
But their pocket's got a hole.

"The World in Their Pocket" by Malvina Reynolds

Malvina Milder Reynolds was born to Jewish immigrant parents in San Francisco in 1900. Because her parents spoke out against America's involvement in World War I, she was denied a high school diploma.  Her teachers still managed to get her into UC Berkeley where she went all the way to a Ph.D. in Romance philology.

It is important to remember that at the turn of the century an American's right to protest was severely restricted.  Many striking workers were shot by Pinkerton detectives, and the governor of Illinois blamed the Haymarket Riot of 1886 on these hired guns.

The Molokans, Russian pacifists who protested World War I on religious grounds, were put in solitary confinement in Leavenworth. As historian  Raymond F. Gregory writes: "They were manacled nine hours a day in a standing position and forbidden to read, write, or even speak." 

Reynolds finished her doctorate in 1938, but as a woman, Jew, and socialist she found it difficult to get a college teaching position.  She worked in a bomber factory instead and enjoyed writing articles about being a working woman.

After the war she started writing songs and turned out over 500 before she died in 1978.  In December 1996 her song "Morningtown Ride," in a recording by The Seekers, reached the top five in the United Kingdom.

The most famous song, however, was "Little Boxes," a piece that resonated with millions who felt constricted and alienated by the conformity of an increasingly monotone society.  While on her way to a performance in La Honda, Reynolds saw a housing development in Daly City. She asked her husband to take the wheel because she "felt a song coming on," and the rest is history. 

Except for the fact that the fear is now deflation rather than inflation, Reynolds was prescient in her song "The World in Their Pocket": "There's inflation and pollution/everything's been bought on credit/in this rotten institution/and they waste the gentle people/cuz the system has no soul." 

Reynolds was born at the end of the Gilded Age, but economic inequality is even worse today. In 1894 John D. Rockefeller made $1.25 million per year, 7,000 times the average American's salary, but hedge fund manager James Simons now makes 38,000 times more than today's average worker. 

Since the election of Ronald Reagan inflation adjusted salaries for ordinary Americans have risen only slightly, and workers have not been rewarded for their productivity, still the highest in the world.

The song "It Isn't Nice" was banned in Japan for fairly mild lines such as "We have tried negotiations/and the three-man picket line/now our new ways aren't nice when we deal with men of ice/but if that is freedom's price/we don't mind."  Reynolds had become the Poetess of Protest and her fans cheered.

In addition to six albums of music for adults, Reynolds also released three albums of children's songs.  "Magic Penny" is the most famous of these with memorable lines such as "love is something if you give it away" and "let's go dancing til the break of day."
The Children's Music Network created the Magic Penney Award in her honor. The award is a "tribute to people in our community who have dedicated their lives to empowering children through music." Reynolds was given the first award posthumously in 1999.

One her children's songs "It's Up To You" begins with "You might have been born a ladybug, you might have been born a bat," but ends with "You were born a being with a mind and a voice, and the power of choice."  That freedom includes the choice to withdraw one's labor and to refuse to go to war.

As a student of theology I find Reynolds' reflections on the soul moving and profound. Her belief that the soul is not an unchanging, immortal essence but "something we accumulate in the course of living" is very much in line with dynamic concepts of self found in Buddhism and the Hebrew Bible.  See my essay on the soul at <www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/SoulSermon.htm>.

Reynolds might have known about the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and might even have read his classic work I and Thou.  In any case she is right to say that "the soul is not an inner pearl. It is a patina created as an individual functions in a community. The soul is a function of communal being." This idea that the self is a social construction is not new: it also can be found in Buddhist, African, and Hebrew thought.

I am not a pacifist not am I a socialist, but I admire this gutsy lady for playing her role in keeping American freedoms alive and well.

Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.

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