American Gulags

The history of civil rights in America bears plenty of scars -- from slavery to interment of Japanese residents to Rodney King. But one blemish that has been unusually well disguised is the network of gulag-style work camps that opened in the days before World War II as part of the federal government Civilian Public Service program. This national network -- which included desolate camps in California, Michigan and Minnesota -- brought together academics, activists and draft resisters of all peaceful stripes and subjected them to mind-numbing, soul-sapping chores with minimal sustenance and under extreme conditions. The nearby townies -- who often had sons fighting abroad -- made things even more miserable for the Yankee Solzhenitsins by serving up threats, insults and the occasional beating. Things were particularly rough for those campers who didn't have a simplistic explanation (the most common of which is generally, "My God told me not to!") to explain their reluctance to go to war. Their government didn't get them so it punished them instead.


While I'm not a pacifist, I was fascinated to learn about this grossly under-reported chapter in American history in Michael Doyle's new biography of Roy Kepler, "Radical Chapters." The highly engaging book, which I reviewed last month for the Weekly and in the Almanac, goes far beyond the facts of Kepler's life and does a masterful job weaving his actions into context, from the early 1920's all the way to the present day. But it's the American gulags that continued to percolate in my memory weeks after I finished the book. Kepler served in several such camps. So had his older brother, Earl, who received a 30-month prison sentence for resisting the draft but then was transferred to a labor camp after getting paroled 10 months into his term. Earl worked in a forest in Glendora for about a month. He died in a fire that was accidentally started by his cabin-mate -- a fire that left 95 percent of his body covered in second- and third-degree burns. I wondered as I was reading whether Earl was still a pacifist while on his deathbed. Or, for that matter, if he was still an atheist.


Roy, who was at his brother's side in the hospital, continued to shuttle between camps, including on called Germfask that was known as the "Alcatraz of CPS." I won't cover all the grizzly details of these camps, but I'm really glad that Doyle had. The camps, which shuttered in 1946, clearly had a lasting impact on people like Roy Kepler and his future book-store patrons -- the peaceniks, the beatniks, the flower children, the militant rebels, the pothead philosophers, the acid-sucking bohemians and the whimsical skeptics who two decades later would rise up against Vietnam, write their own radical chapters and become, in their own right,  revolutionaries.

Michael Doyle, who is incidentally a former Palo Alto Weekly writer, will be reading from "Radical Chapters" on Oct. 16, from 7 to 9 p.m., at (where else?) Kepler's in Menlo Park.


Book review: Roy Kepler's war on war
Radical pacifism and the making of an institution

"Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution," by Michael Doyle, Syracuse University Press, 416 pp., $29.95.

By Gennady Sheyner

Roy Kepler's life was a tale of two revolutions: one that gave rise to war protests, draft resisters and the bohemian, anti-establishment sensibilities of the late 1960s, and another one that brought paperback books to the masses and, in the process, redefined the bookstore as we know it.

But he didn't look like a typical revolutionary, or, for that matter, a typical bohemian. He did not sport a Che beret, hurl Molotov cocktails, shroud himself in beatnik black, or wear flowers in his hair. While his associates favored group hugs, painted buses andspiraled-down, mind-bending acid trips, Roy Kepler saved his trips for places like Livermore, where he was arrested in 1960 for protesting the recently built nuclear lab; and Oakland, where he was arrested in 1968 after leading a peaceful demonstration in front of the Oakland Induction Center, a transfer point for soldiers about to go to war.

As Michael Doyle illustrates in his excellent new biography, "Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution," Mr. Kepler was a sharp, unsentimental businessman, known less for his own personality than for those of wild, world-changing bohemians who populated his popular Menlo Park bookstore, a landmark institution that plans to reopen its own next chapter later this month. But while he often wasn't the loudest or the wildest man in the room, he was, above all, a leader, a man who parlayed his own lifelong pacifism into a broad anti-war movement and, in the process, created a institution that continues to change and inspire bookworms in Menlo Park and beyond.

Roy Kepler is brought back to life in this new biography by Mr. Doyle, a journalist with the McClatchy newspaper chain and a former Palo Alto Weekly reporter. Mr. Doyle's deeply sympathetic and intimate look at Mr. Kepler's life and times follows its subject from his humble upbringing in Denver, to his war-resistance efforts during World War II and the Vietnam War, to his radical experiences with new institutions such as the Free University and the Institute for Nonviolent Studies, to his wild success in transforming his stuffy but eclectic bookshop into the Bay Area's leading melting pot for revolutionary thinkers.

Roy Kepler was born in Denver in 1920 and first became a "radical pacifist" at the onset of World War II, a period when being a conscientious objector didn't endear one to the general population, particularly when the stance had no religious basis. His brother, Earl, also a pacifist, received a 30-month sentence for resisting the war and avoiding the draft. Though he was paroled after 10 months, Earl would never see happy days. He joined the Civilian Public Service and was assigned to work in a forest north of Glendora, the same camp where Roy was based. Within a month, a fire that was accidentally started by his cabin-mate destroyed his cabin and left 95 percent of Earl's body covered in second- and third-degree burns. He died in the hospital.

Roy Kepler would spend his early 20s shuttling through various work camps, including Germfask, a CPS camp in northern Michigan known as the "Alcatraz of CPS." With morale plummeting because of tedious labor, scarce supplies and aggression from residents of nearby towns, Germfask men fought back with pranks, shattering a 3-gallon mustard jar in the kitchen, clogging latrines, covering the floor in a layer of white flour topped with obscenities written in coffee grounds, calling in sick in alphabetical order.

The camp was ultimately shut down and Roy went to another camp in Minersville, in northern Sacramento Valley, where conditions were nearly as dismal. Before long, the war was over, the camps were dismantled and the civilian program was shut down. In March of 1946, Roy Kepler became a 

free man.

His freedom and the end of World War II did little to diminish his opposition to war and conscription. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he took part in antiwar protests and joined a series of pacifist organizations, including the prominent and relatively conservative War Resisters League and the smaller but more radical activist group called the Peacemakers.

As a member of WRL, he did his best to encourage nonviolent confrontation and, in 1947, he and his supporters spearheaded a resolution stating that the League would promote "political, economic and social revolution by non-violent means." He advocated tax resistance and took part in protests opposing the 1948 draft, which lawmakers instituted to counter the looming threat from the Soviet Union. By September of that year, he climbed to the top of the League's administration, becoming its executive secretary.

He fell into the book business almost by accident. In the early 1950s, he enrolled in college, traveled to France on a Fulbright scholarship, held a brief stint at the radio station KPFA, got married, had a daughter, and took a job for Eastern News Service, a distributor of books and magazines. The gig involved extensive traveling and gave him a critical exposure to the publishing business.

By the spring of 1955, he began contemplating his own venture — a bookstore that would specialize in paperbacks, a new book type that was largely viewed as vulgar by Stanford Bookstore and other booksellers in the Palo Alto area. In May of that year, Kepler's Books & Magazines opened shop at its first location, 939 El Camino Real in Menlo Park.

Kepler's was one of three independent bookstores that were just starting out in the early 1950s. Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood in 1953. Three years later, Pat and Fred Cody opened the first Cody's books in Berkeley — a store that attracted a strong following from the city's anti-war crowd. Each sought to create something greater than a place that sells books — a community where browsing is encouraged and where connections form.

It is this quality that helped sustain Kepler's through the era of chain bookstores and Amazon — forces that put many independent booksellers out of business (Cody's, for instance, closed down in 2006). Kepler's itself went through a series of close calls and was rescued on more than one occasion by investors from the high-tech field who used to patronize the venerable bookstore.

In 2005, with its finances in shambles, the store was shut down and was saved only by a community outcry and an injection of funds from a team of investors. Earlier this year, Roy's son and longtime store proprietor Clark Kepler retired from the family business, and Kepler's welcomed a new transition team led by former Kepler's enthusiast Praveen Madan. The new Kepler's is scheduled to reopen in late September.

Mr. Doyle's book, like Kepler's bookstore, is loaded with cameos from legendary bohemians and storied pacifists, from the civil-rights pioneer Bayard Rustin and troubled beatnik Allen Ginsberg to the shaggy-haired rocker Jerry Garcia and the charismatic Paly graduate Joan Baez, a prominent figure in Roy Kepler's life.

It was at Kepler's that Jerry Garcia, a store regular, met his future Grateful Dead collaborators, the lyricist Robert Hunter and bassist Phil Lesh. Ken Kesey stopped by the store in 1964 in search of a driver for his bus, which would become immortalized in Tom Wolfe's classic "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." It was here that a curious young nerd named Steve Wozniak pored through computer books and absorbed the knowledge he would later use to help launch another revolution in Silicon Valley. And it was also here that Ira Sandperl, an eloquent pacifist and Ms. Baez's intellectual guru, worked his bard-like magic as a bookstore clerk.

Mr. Doyle devotes plenty of text to the tight teacher-student bond between Mr. Sandperl and Ms. Baez. This includes their establishment in 1965 of the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence at Ms. Baez's Carmel Valley ranch. The venture, which Mr. Kepler helped finance and which ebbed and flowed through several locations before fizzling out in the mid-1970s, was one of many alternative-education projects he would experiment with during the Vietnam War era.

In 1965, he helped start the "Free U," a school that by 1969 claimed to serve 1,275 students and that included among its eclectic offerings nonviolence seminars, improvisational drama classes, and courses on capitalism and neocolonialism. Among his more quixotic efforts was a series of Peace Games, intense role-playing exercises that would split participants into attackers and defenders and included linked arms, mock executions and real tears.

Throughout the era of protests, experiments and change, Roy Kepler remained a constant force — the adult in the room, a man whose pacifist ideals remained fixed and yet tempered by realistic expectations. Ms. Baez described him in a 1994 interview with the Palo Alto Weekly as a "steady, solid, nonviolent rock," according to the book. His wife, Patricia, even likened him to a statue once, "a steadfastly unemotional man more easily admired than embraced," Mr. Doyle writes.

Even when vandals hurled cherry bombs at his stores and threatened to target his house in the late 1960s, Mr. Kepler remained unflappable. While others in his circles saw mayhem and violence as plausible tools in resisting the status quo, he remained tethered to his pacifist convictions up until his death on New Year's Day in 1994 at the age of 73.

Mr. Doyle doesn't try to veil his own admiration for his subject. His portrayal of Roy Kepler and his inner circle is intimate and deeply sympathetic. He consistently refers to Mr. Kepler, Mr. Sandperl and Ms. Baez by their first names and he doesn't dig too deeply into the philosophical underpinnings of Mr. Kepler's and Mr. Sandperl's pacifist convictions. Nor does he raise any questions or present any challenges to Mr. Kepler's and Mr. Sandperl's fixed commitment to nonviolence — there are no discussions of "just wars" in this book.

But the author does a masterly job in weaving Roy Kepler's life into the colorful, rapidly shifting context of the Bay Area in the second half of the 20th century and in explaining how this principled visionary both shaped and was shaped by the zeitgeist around him.

Facing the music

My latest book review for the Weekly concerns a once-blooming industry that is now in decline because of changing habits, fickle tastes and unsustainable financial models. For once, it's not newspapers, though I'm far from smiling.

The book, which explains why so many American symphonies are now on life support, is a bittersweet read. Robert Flanagan's thorough scholarship and clear writing (as one would expect from a Stanford University business professor) give his sobering conclusions great credibility. The book is impeccably organized and, at around 200 pages, surprisingly concise given how much information he packs in. But the mood is definitely more Sibelius than Bradenburg, particularly for the dwindling masses who get pleasure from live classical music. There are no magical solutions here, but at least we can now understand the exact nature of the ship's mechanical problems as we watch it sink.


An Unfinished Symphony

Stanford scholar Robert Flanagan digs into the financial troubles of American orchestras

 "The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras," by Robert J. Flanagan, Yale University Press, 240 pp., $50
 

When the Philadelphia Orchestra announced in April 2011 its plan to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the news thundered through the arts community in the City of Brotherly Love like a gong in the middle of a Chopin sonata.

Since its founding in 1900, the beloved institution has risen to prominence as one of the nation's Big Five, along with the New York, Boston, Chicago and Cleveland orchestras. But with expenses hovering far above revenues and labor concessions out of reach, the orchestra's trustees decided that bankruptcy was the only way to close a gaping deficit. It became the largest orchestra in the nation's history to file for Chapter 11.

To those who have been tracking trends in the symphonic scene, the move probably didn't seem so jarring. Orchestras have never been cash cows. Even in the best of times, ticket sales have consistently failed to cover performance costs, forcing musicians to rely on patrons, endowments and government grants for sustenance. These revenue sources become particularly critical during economic downturns, just as they become scarcer.

Still, bankruptcies have been limited largely to smaller organizations: the Louisville Orchestra in 2011, the Honolulu Orchestra in 2009 and the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra in 2003. Philadelphia's was remarkable because of the prominence of the institution.

The financial crisis for orchestras has many sources, including unsustainable labor costs, a diminishing audience, a sluggish economy and dwindling government support.

So what's an orchestra to do? That's the question at the heart of "The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras: Artistic Triumphs and Economic Challenges," a new book by Stanford professor Robert Flanagan. By collecting and analyzing data from dozens of American orchestras large and small, Flanagan offers a sober-minded and, as the title implies, sobering look at today's symphony scene.

With an accountant's precision, he tracks the orchestras' historic trends, pores through their financial books, and carefully tracks current and historic levels of private contributions, endowments, musician salaries and government support. He compares the business models of America's orchestras to their counterparts abroad, analyzes the labor trends in the symphony scene and segregates the short-term impacts of economic recessions from the longer-term effect of the "cost disease" inherent in their business models. What emerges is a portrait of an industry filled with interrelated problems and few good solutions.

Not all of these problems are unique to orchestras. The most basic pitfall — expenditures that rise faster than revenues — is familiar to the auto industry, to name one of many possible examples. But orchestras have one distinct disadvantage. A carmaker may lay off workers or seek cheaper parts abroad; an orchestra can't outsource its woodwind section to China during a performance of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." A carmaker can adopt technology to boost efficiency and improve the company's productivity — the only sure-fire way to keep up with rising labor costs. But a concerto will take just as long to play during the good times and the bad.

This "cost disease" has become more irksome over time, as labor unions have begun to flex their collective-bargaining muscles, prompting labor costs to climb. Becoming a symphony musician is an arduous, highly competitive ordeal, with the supply of trained musicians far exceeding the demand. But, as Flanagan shows, those who make it tend to do well. In fact, as his analysis indicates, over the past two decades musicians' compensation has been climbing at a faster rate than that of other professions. He found that since 1987, the salary increases for orchestra musicians in his sample of American symphonies averaged 4.2 percent per year, compared to the 3.6 percent in salary increases received by other union and nonunion employees in the United States, on average.

"Pay increases for orchestra musicians also exceeded the pay gains of university teachers and health workers, who also work in sectors that have low productivity gains but face much stronger demand," Flanagan writes. "In short, the pay of orchestra musicians not only kept up with pay increases elsewhere in the economy, as suggested by the cost disease argument; their pay also increased more rapidly than the pay of most other groups of workers in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st Century."

To make matters worse, Flanagan found that the wage increases musicians receive weren't correlated with the orchestra's financial performance. Instead, they were generally linked to how much the orchestra has received in private donations — hardly a formula for long-term stability.

Unsustainable labor costs aren't the only problem. Audiences have been decreasing steadily but consistently, despite growth in the general population. According to a National Endowment for the Arts survey that Flanagan cites, 13 percent of polled adults reported in 1982 that they had attended at least one classical-music concert in the past year. By 2008, that number dropped to 9.3 percent. Performance revenues made up 48 percent of orchestras' total revenues in 1982, then fell to 37 percent in 2005.

Communities such as Philadelphia and Detroit, which have seen significant population declines, have been hit particularly hard. Interestingly enough, Flanagan found that a community's population plays a much greater role in orchestra attendance than factors such as per capita income or unemployment. Unfortunately for orchestras, that is one factor that they have absolutely no control over.

Flanagan's book offers plenty of advice for easing the financial pain through prudent financial management. A board of directors should diversify its orchestra's investment portfolios and institute conflict-of-interest policies to promote prudence (shockingly, only 60 percent currently have such policies). An orchestra manager should create more differentiation in ticket prices (that is, charge more for the most preferred seats and less for the least preferred ones) to get the most per ticket. Musicians should be aware of the orchestra's financial picture when making compensation demands during negotiations.

But he also emphasizes that there is no "silver bullet" and cautions of "the futility of a single solution." Raising performance revenues, for example, may narrow the gap but it would take much more to eliminate it. "Even filling the concert hall — an ambitious goal for an industry usually selling 70 percent of its capacity — would not eliminate deficits at most orchestras," Flanagan writes.

The same can be said about nonperformance income such as donations and government subsidies. Flanagan concludes that nonperformance income growth alone is "unlikely to cover future structural budget deficits, unless supplemented with actions to narrow the deficit itself by both raising the growth of performance revenues and slowing the growth of expenses."

Flanagan's book is unlikely to cheer up a fan of classical music. It offers a rare and unsparing look inside a troubled industry where backstage problems often get obscured by front-stage polish. Some sections may sound a bit wonky for a general reader unconcerned about the methodologies trustees use in investing endowment proceeds, but anyone interested in getting the story behind the recent rash of orchestra bankruptcies will find plenty to like here.

But as "perilous" as the lives of symphony orchestras may be, Philadelphia's experience also offers a glimmer of hope. On July 30, after more than 15 months of negotiations, the orchestra officially came out of bankruptcy with a plan that includes labor concessions; reduced rent from the Kimmel Center, the concert hall where the orchestra performs; and greater oversight over investments by the philanthropy group Annenberg Foundation.

Some issues remain unresolved. There are contested claims from creditors and concerns about the departure of some musicians unhappy about the new labor conditions. But orchestra administrators were happy to announce that the deal "addressed more than $100 million in claims, debts, and liabilities with a settlement of $5.49 million" and that the music is resuming this month, when the orchestra launches its new season.

For all the gloom and doom, a requiem for American symphony orchestras would be premature.

Titled

Rebecca says something like:

"Every time one of these Disney family movies comes out, it's always advertised as a 'fun-filled romp for the whole family.'"

I respond with something like:

"Or a rollicking adventure. Or a lively romp."

"Well, I guess you wouldn't want a stodgy romp," she says.

"Or a somber romp."

Except, maybe sometimes you do. Maybe there's something intensely appealing about playing seriously. Isn't that what a writer does? There are moments when craft dissolves under subtle epiphanies and deep emotions and the art of arranging words becomes for the writer a matter of life and death (or, more typically, fuzzy ecstasies and debilitating inconveniences). It's still a game, though no one is laughing. It's a somber romp.