The Birth of Columbia Part 2

_**

The Birth of Columbia (A biography of Samantha Waver, part 2)​

**_

A fellow artist, Spartak had changed his name as part of his parents’ protest at the “Americanization” process that stripped them of their original names, and the two took a shining to each other straight away. He would soon begin to date her once the two returned to school, and despite the odds managed to stay close after graduating from Bay Ridge High School[1] with distinguishment in the arts in 1921.

Her path would take her to attain a degree at Hunter College, working part time as a cartoonist for the Daily Worker, marrying Spartak in 1923 and giving birth to her own first child Brigid in 1924. Her passion for animation would not go unnoticed however, and she made a number of early shorts, most to be passed through the union.

Nor was her passion for fiction, as she would bury herself in the works of the Edda and Homer, H.G Wells, Jules Verne, Lovecraft, and more, often submitting illustrations to many of the magazines publishing modern pulp fiction works. She came to assemble the idea for Columbia throughout the twenties, working with Spartak and their new colleague Samawal Hamidi, or as he’s often known Samuel Hardy.

Black and Muslim, Samawal had born his own marks of capital after living through Jim Crow,moving to the Big Apple, and would become fast friends with the two. Samawal had studied the arts extensively and came to be “possessed of the desire to show the white man that a negro is not a person without art and culture” and introduced the two to many of the African legends and myths he had found in his studies during their talks with each other.

He came to be involved in African National Congress politics at an early age, angry at the fact that even in places without Jim Crow segregation he was still being paid less than his white and Christian counterparts and so often found himself being given the lowliest positions in any artistic job he could find. Which of course, made him quite a natural fit for Samantha and Spartak.

The three of them would make a number of important contributions to animation during the 20s, usually in the form of shorts before feature length films, though they increasingly tried for more ambitious efforts within the medium as time went on. With the boom time of the twenties, work was plentiful enough and thanks to the heavily leftist dominated nature of film, many of their early shorts were able to get away with highly provocative material.

The short “Womb to Tomb”, depicting a person’s life from birth to death, looking forward to the promise of wealth and security only to find that poverty has interest and themselves getting poorer while their boss gets richer until their boss’ undead skeleton emerges from a splendid crypt and welcomes them to a tiny, forgotten grave is still considered one of the classic works of pre-revolutionary agitprop.

Extra money was raised on the side by doing more private commissioned artwork that was used to fund the distribution of agitprop work, political cartoons. Alongside their commercial work, this commission work has attracted a sort of cult following in the present. The themes covered were eclectic and variable and while Samantha tried to refuse offers of work from people whose politics were too divergent from her own, some did slip through the cracks to her distaste.

This did however, lead them to contact with some Heathen and Gnostic sects that had begun to spread throughout America as word of their interest in mythology spread. The Sophian Church of Gnosis, a group that would later gain a place in the annals of rightist and anti-feminist conspiracy theories; contacted the trio to make a banner for their young religious group.

The piece, which would come to be known as the “judgement of Yaldabaoth” cast the scorning of Yaldabaoth by Sophia and Christ in an anti-capitalist light; showing the flawed creator as a patriarchal oppressor spurred by hatred of his mother and chaining man to bonds of ignorance, rules, and drudgery to suppress the creative soul. Throughout the process of creating the piece, the three would immerse themselves in gnostic lore to gain a better perspective of what they were working on.

What was read seemed to strike a chord in Samantha in particular, who was frequently disappointed by how masculine most mythology she read was. Casting the source of human creative spirit and liberation in the form of the epitome of feminine wisdom was “refreshing in all the best ways” to a fresh out of university Waver, and she struck up what would be a long friendship with Irene Vasseur; a mystic within the temple and recent French immigrant. A number of other illustrations would be made, largely centered around the theme of gnostic liberation from the chains of material, patriarchal slavery.

This would be followed by contact with the Heathen league, which exposed the ever mythology hungry Samantha to an influx of obscure translated Norse, Germanic, and Saxon folklore, sagas, and myths. In a world dominated by Greco-Roman and Arthurian-Carolingian studies, Pagan Germanic mythopoeia was rather obscure outside of continental Europe.

But with so many starting to question the predominant faith of Christianity in the wake of the great war’s senseless slaughter, what would once be something of a taboo association with pagan barbarism was now something approaching acceptable. Being of minority, albeit monotheistic faiths themselves; they saw little harm in collaborating with the heathens on the side between their other work.

Ulfric Asthorsson notably requested a number of illustrations for his ambition to create a standardised holy text for his heathen faith; interested in the trio’s dynamic and stylistic drawings over the abstractified or the realistic art forms that predominated in the day. Each of the three would spend about a year illustrating the text before presenting the final document to Ulfric’s temple. Perhaps most notably for her later work, a young girl drawn as one of the Valkyries would later come to heavily influence the depiction of Commander Columbia in the future.

With the twenties being seen as a time for many oppressed peoples to come out of the shadows and step into the daylight, Samantha would make a series of important meetings and liaisons with many of these groups.

Sapphic and Uranian groups were widely represented in the WCPA even to the muted grumblings of many within the party about “bourgeois decadence.” Though she mostly remained quiet about such comments, she found to her surprise that Irene was also part of a Sapphic group, and when she responded with curiosity rather than disgust; was allowed to ask frankly about what Irene’s experiences were like. Despite the often vicious and salacious rumour mongering about Samantha’s correspondence with Irene; the rather mundane truth is that they were simply friends who had significant influence on one another’s work.

And that’s hardly where the trio’s burgeoning network of contacts ended. Asiatic and Hispanic American immigrants often came to New York City in search of finding a place within the “Big Apple” as the largest city in America experienced a great flourishing of culture and prosperity. Mingling with rural white and southern black internal migrants as well as Native Americans hoping to leave the poverty of the reservations after the Indian Citizenship act, New York City was becoming “the planet in one city” in the worlds of Jack Reed in his tribute to the largest of American cities. Or to those less fond of what it stood for; “the house and hearth of degeneracy” to use the invective of Adolf Hitler some years later.

Eager and willing to learn as much as they could, Samantha, Spartak and Samawal would frequently travel across the city when they weren’t working or attending party services. Their journal entries would speak at great length about their experiences and how many felt some degree of cautious optimism for the future. However, this cautious optimism; as Samantha would note in some of the scripts she wrote during the period through the mouths of her characters; was well aware that it could all be taken away.

Nostalgists for the last decade of the second republic’s life; it’s “golden age” and black legendists often come to loggerheads about the truth of the era. Certainly there was greater acceptance of those outside of the traditional wealthy, male, white, heterosexual and cisgendered Anglo-Saxon protestant ruling class but it was never too hard to find discrimination.

Even with the legal emancipation for people of colour and women and a degree of tolerance towards non-christians and GRSM individuals there were still plenty who openly repudiated the shifts in society. Many of the period work of the trio sought to capture the still lingering issues in society and give lie to the claim that class balance and prosperity for all had come.

A noted rightist group in New York City would even post a hit piece on the trio as they started to gain some notoriety. Labelling them as communist provocateurs and social degenerates preying on “infantile newcomers”, this assassination campaign would see their professions’ security threatened until a strike was arranged to protest even considering letting them go to appease “reactionary bullies.”

The synagogue that Samantha attended would face vandalism on the fourth of April 1927 in an attack traced to reactionary groups seeking to terrify a Jewish community believed to be agents of the Bolshevik conspiracy. And similar hate crimes would often fall upon other minority groups, such as the African Muslim Council that Samawal helped to start within New York City; as well as against Native, Asian, and Hispanic support groups that established themselves in the rapidly growing metropolis.

In Samantha’s own words “The liberation of the oppressed was so often portrayed as an issue of a dispute among the rulers; those who they said sold out to whom they believed to be inferiors and those who they said couldn’t see the benefits of elevating the oppressed. The idea that liberation came from the oppressed’s own struggle for recognition never crossed their minds. So I imagine that caused at least half the shock of the sympathetic when the people they believed to be in need of rescue turned up to WCPA meetings of their own accord.”

These lingering tensions lead many to join movements like the Workers’ Communist Party on their own, seeking out the party rather than waiting to be proselytised to. Samawal himself would write an influential piece on how the resistance of the downtrodden themselves without aid from the sympathetic among the oppressing class was incalculably more valuable than any amount of “respectability”. In a time when many said that bigotry would seen become a thing of the past, the three became loud voices for the need to move forward and not stop simply because those in power felt satisfied with how much farther those kept out of power had come.

But with a Republican party at least tepidly in favour of progressive, class collaborationist and reformist efforts, a Democratic Party amenable to a more populist agenda in an attempt to expand beyond a southern rural white demographic, and a Workers’ Party with a significant Austro-Marxist faction; many doubted whether confrontation was needed or even wise. With the creation of more radical works from the trio slowing down over time, it seemed that they had some issues with finding an audience for continued radicalism.