JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
The iconic, prodigiously-talented illustrator, old lefty and great inventive soul Rockwell Kent designed and drew this cover for Isobel Walker Soule's The Vigilantes Hide Behind the Flag, a slim but powerful little pamphlet published by the National Committee for Defense of Political Prisoners in 1937. Ms. Soule was a very present social worker and protagonist for the rights of workers--she and Kent would have shared this great passion--and published this work dealing with armed strike breakers (the "vigilantes") as small targets and Fascists and the like as the larger--those, as well as the groups established by "the economic royalists (who) have given marching orders to their hordes and hope to trap the middle class into the vigilante net they've spread".
{Soule could really spike a paragraph: here's an example of her addressing former Ashevillean William Dudley Pelley, founder of the lost-soul hate group the Silver Shirts:
"...He was a YMCA representative with the AEF to Siberia in 1917. Returning to America he wrote for pulp magazines. he became a spiritualist. He had an inspiration and wrote a story in which he claimed to have died,and spent seven minutes in eternity. On the basis of his fan mail he founded a magazine in North Carolina with his clair-audient voices from the ether as assistant editors. Out of the magazine he founded the Silver Shirts".)
Soule fills up a stubby thirty pages like few others, addressing the very-present issues of thug-backed union-busting and the powerful growth of fascists at home and abroad.
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