Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Shadows and Substances" In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 245-247). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, Summer 1979
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
An ice-pick slammed into the brain slew Leon Trotsky. Everybody knows that.
What everybody doesn't know is that an identical weapon was viciously used in the same way to slaughter a talented and beautiful woman radical of the '30s—Frances Farmer, once-acclaimed star of Broadway and Hollywood.
The perpetrator of the first crime was a depraved Stalinist henchman whose heinous act was a front-page sensation. But the coldblooded murderers of the outspoken and rebellious actress were never brought to justice because they were the political establishment.
The usual cabal of FBI and CIA agents, rightwing vigilantes, police, film studio moguls, Tory judges, and the power structure of the city of Seattle (Farmer's hometown) joined forces in this case with the psychiatric witch doctors, and conspired to harness the unconventional politics of a brave and brilliant feminist-before-her-time.
For the crime of dissidence, Farmer was arrested, confined to the loony bin (Western State Hospital in Steilacoom, Washington) and subjected to a snake pit regimen of torture and degradation previously reserved for recalcitrant Wobblies and Asian immigrants. She was administered incredible doses of untested drugs, electroshock and hydrotherapy, and was mass-raped by orderlies.
Yet they couldn’t break her mind, her will or her indomitable revolutionary spirit. So in 1948—national witch hunt time—they plunged the “therapeutic” pick into her magnificent brain. Farmer disintegrated into passivity and died at 56, a burned-out, disoriented recluse.
This terrible tale of psychiatric abuse, of totalitarian mind control to enforce conformity, is cautiously but indignantly told by William Arnold in his stunning book Shadowland, a biography of Farmer—and of America.
Anti-communist hysteria is endemic to the Pacific Northwest.
Its lurid history is replete with the corpses of IWW labor martyrs; the radical Congressman Marion Zioncheck, hounded to death by J. Edgar Hoover and his cronies; Anna Louise Strong, revolutionary journalist without honor in her Seattle hometown; and innumerable other rebels who dared challenge the status quo and proclaim their partisanship of a better way to live and to arrange social interactions.
Of course, lots of us hell-raisers and muckrakers and social critics do manage, most of the time, to fly over the cuckoo's nest, evade the cops, outflank the neo-Nazi terrorists, and escape the prefrontal lobotomies.
Where we do get it is squarely in the pocketbook. The ruling class simply exerts economic and legal sanctions against us so that we are excluded from gainful employment. Job discrimination is the shadowy shape of organized brainwashing and political reprisal in our era.
I ought to know. From the World War II loyalty oaths through the dismal days of the McCarthy purges and up until this very moment, I have been afflicted by economic harassment.
For five long, insolvent years, I have struggled to regain my job with City Light, whose management fired me because of their political and sex bias. And now, after incredible legal adventures involving the top levels of city government, my hearing is slated for September.
And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if a pompous practitioner from the psychiatric establishment materializes on the witness stand to speak to my sanity and competence. As author Arnold says, “It can happen to anyone.” And it mostly happens to women. But experience has prepared us for these mental health medievalists, and we know how to prove that traditional psychiatry is as obsolete as the power structure that wields it against us, as absurd as the FBI informants lurking in the shadows of political cases.
We will not forget or forsake Frances Farmer. Amidst our troubles we will pay tribute to her fierce strength of character. And we will avenge her sacrifice in all our victories to come, in this new age of Aquarius.