Joe Hill and Troy Davis

Is there a tradition of political and racial bias in the United States judicial system? In executing Troy Davis on september 21st 2011, the State of Georgia may have demonstrated that this is the case.

On october 1, 2011, The New York Times Topics page featured a list of articles on ”False Arrests, Convictions and Imprisonments”.
These articles about the death penalty give evidence of jurors and judges who, in their decisions, risk being driven by biases of ”race, class and politics which influence all aspects of American life”.
Do you agree that the influence of such biases has made ”discrimination and arbitrariness the hallmarks of the death penalty” in The United States of America?

A notorious case in the American history of capital punishment is that of labour activist Joe Hill, executed in Utah in 1915.
Recently new evidence has been brought to light giving strong support to those who have claimed him innocent.

Joe Hill’s case is interesting as an instance of the bias of class and politics in capital punishment. As a member of the labor union Industrial Workers of the World, Joe Hill became the target of a political and class-biased hatred emanating from a class war in the US where workers and capital owners have often been known to go far beyond the limits of law to defend their interests.

A historical incident that gives an idea of the hatred that has sometimes characterised class relations and class biases in the USA is the infamous Centralia massacre in 1919. This incident was the result of a ”conflict between the American Legion and workers who were members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or "Wobblies")”. It is is said to have resulted in ”a deep-rooted enmity between the local American Legion and the Wobblies that persisted into the 21st century” (Wikipedia).

In his novel 1919 which is the second part in his trilogy U.S.A., John Dos Passos gives a strong picture of the conflict in Centralia. On the blog ”Story of the week” you can read his whole story about the Centralia massacre. (Click this link to read, or copy it and paste into the address field http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2011/08/paul-bunyan.html


If you know about instances of how the enmity resulting in the execution of Joe Hill in 1915 and the Centralia incident in 1919 has persisted or been resisted locally or otherwise into the 21st century, please write a comment to this blog.

My first question: is there still a political and racial bias in the judicial system of the United States?
And my second: If so - how do Americans try to come to terms with it?

LITTERATURTEORI: David H Dickson - min forskning

Litteraturforskning är en av de saker jag är glad över. Litteraturteori! 

1997 disputerade jag på avhandlingen "The Utterance of America: Emersonian Newness in Dos Passsos' U.S.A. and Pynchon's Vineland"

Mitt forskningsområde är hur litteraturen gestaltar människans möjligheter till förändring. Förutom min doktorsavhandling har jag publicerat en del litteraturvetenskapliga artiklar:

1994: "Reading in the Maelstrom of History". Mitt första försök att kritiskt granska olika teorier om hur människors tankar förändras. Envisa teorier om att man alltid adopterar andras färdiga tankar. Min lika envisa inställning att människor ibland kan tänka nya tankar. Lite om förutsättningarna för det (fulltext):
http://books.google.se/books?id=LnWXRyVES4MC&pg=PA217&lpg=PA217&dq=David+Dickson+Bakhtin&source=bl&ots=5Rb20GYZTI&sig=xm13Oh-FMT7_SfCK7nFV03IsqXo&hl=sv&ei=Pv1_TILIM4rIswb5mMz_Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=David%20Dickson%20Bakhtin&f=false

2002 recenserade tidskriften Pynchon Notes en artikel jag publicerat om Thomas Pynchons roman Vineland:
"By moving us into the territory of a positive task and of a positive aesthetics for the fragmentary subject, Dickson offers a glimmer of hope for a contemporary self yet to be begun."(länken borttagen från nätet 20101001)

Här finns en recension, som bland mycket annat tar upp en artikel jag publicerat om Thomas Pynchons försök att gestalta nya sätt att söka kunskap:
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5002088989

1999 skrev Jeffery Baker en märklig och viktig recension av min doktorsavhandling i tidskriften Pynchon Notes. Min forskning och de resultat som redovisas i avhandlingen öser han beröm över. Däremot kritiserar han häftigt det faktum att jag publicerat avhandlingen. Den form, som en avhandling måste ha hindrar en effektiv presentation av innehållet, menar han. I artikeln tar han publiceringen av min avhandling som exempel på en global trend där universitet och forskare av konkurrensskäl tvingas publicera avhandlingar till varje pris istället för att ge tid till omarbetning för att bättre tillgängliggöra viktiga forskningsresultat. "Publish and Perish" är titeln. Jag ser ju att titeln skulle kunna ses som tillämplig på min karriär. Må så vara - men det djupa kunskapssökande som mitt arbete med doktorsavhandlingen innebar har berikat och berikar mitt liv till denna dag. 

   Nedan har jag lagt in länkar till Bakers artikel (fulltext). Först dock några citat av Baker som väl beskriver centrala element i avhandlingen:

Om avhandlingens teoretisk bakgrund:

”Dickson ... searches for "new values--social and ethical"--which he sees as products of dialogic processes both between present time and history, and between cultures or speech genres existing simultaneously in the present.”

Om min analys av John Dos Passos roman U.S.A.:

 ”[b]rilliantly, in reconfiguring the novel's primary dialectic from capitalist/socialist to "heroization/masterlessness," Dickson recontextualizes the novel's interpretation into a close examination of narrative strategies--a useful contribution to a moribund corpus of Dos Passos criticism ...”

 Om mina slutsatser i analysen av Thomas Pynchons Vineland:

”... for Dickson, "In its construction of the relation between transcendental vision and the social world, Vineland exempts Prairie from creating her own role within preexisting historical designs ..."”

Barkers bedömning av avhandlingens kvalité:

”... [Dickson's] arguments do indeed make a significant contribution to the scholarship on Emersonian literary pragmatism more generally and on these two novels more particularly.”

”let me clarify my evaluation of Dickson's effort: His work is thorough and consummately professional; it is everything a well-researched, well-thought-out and well-articulated doctoral dissertation should be.”

Bakers kritik av den publiceringspolicy, som praktiseras av universitet världen över avslutas med följande ord;

”One can only hope that Dickson's excellent beginning here won't perish on the vine--not despite a lack of publication, but because of its publication in a form ill-suited to allowing this scholar's effort to be seen in its best light.”

Tänkvärt både för mig som forskare och för de instanser som utövar ekonomisk press på den akademiska forskningsvärlden. 

Tyvärr har länkarna till Bakers artikel tagits bort från nätet (2010 09 30)