The Pitchfork

[You can find Part 1 here and I fibbed there's a third part coming. Photos of DWG subsistence farmstead in both posts all courtesy of the Library of Congress.] As we left off yesterday Dalworthington Gardens, Texas looked to be on the ropes a bare year into its founding as a New Deal planned farm community. But slowly and stubbornly those 26 remaining families hung on and through their own self-organization and tighter administration from New Deal entities conditions start shifting from god-awful to livable. In 1935 the overstretched administration of the program (it's running similar colonies of varying scales all throughout the country such as this beautifully-documented one outside Dayton, Ohio ) is shifted to the newly-created Resettlement Administration headed by the magnificently-named Rexford G. Tugwell.  The shift in program administration accidentally and narrowly saves both the national program and Dalworthington Gardens as a few months later the Supreme

The section of Arlington I went to grade school in is a crazy quilt of rapid urban development. The shining new tract of townhomes that we moved into in the late 1970s jostled with looming mysterious pecan orchards, lonely cowfields, straight broad new avenues, and a sprawling (and miraculously still thriving) sprocket factory. Just a quarter mile down the road stands the portmanteau-cursed enclave of Dalworthington Gardens. In that suburb inside a suburb, one could easily think it was a town planned wholly by non-medicated schizophrenics. Old wooden shotgun homes stand on long rectangle plots thick with livestock rub right up against gated McMansions, checkerboarded with scraggly patches of vestigial Cross-Timber woodlands. The only thing tying them together seemingly being the immensity and uniformity of the multi-acre lots and the shits not given to urban planning. Except for those spare few minutes ruminating in the car as I pull out of Mom's driveway, my brain neve

What Is This? First and foremost this blog is about bottom-up politics. The kind of little “p” politics that places building and supporting social movements, the vital messy motor of real change, and left organization as one of its primary focuses. The blog is a personal call back to political writing and thinking having drifted away from a career in labor journalism. Expect windmill tilting on a range of subjects that tickles the fancy. The tremendous upsurge of the last year unlocked by the rising movement floating around and alongside the edges of the Sanders campaign carried me along and this blog aims to capture the fluid up and downs of that wave as it hits the tough existential challenges ahead. It's also a blog about Texas and the dogged resistance that has popped here in this big-talking old bird of a state with its long, bloody borderlands history. What's with the Name? The Pitchfork was a Dallas-based socialist/left-populist rabble-rousing ma