Front Lines: A Lifetime of Drawing Resistance. Susan Simensky Bietila. Oakland:PM Press. 213pp. $21.95.
Review by Paul Buhle
A nineteenth century reviewer, now long forgotten, wrote about a new work: “This is no book, THIS IS A LIFE!”
And so we can say for Front Lines. Actually, it is a lovely book, both charming and moving. Bietila’s art can be called “comics” and has been for a long time—she is a contributor to WOBBLIES!, the centenary collection about the IWW that I brought together, with a host of others, in 2005—or it could be called strategic and tactical art. Or it needs a new definition suited to the political artist!
The adjectives grow difficult for another, all-important reason. Susan Simensky Bietila narrates us through her own life and work. She is one of the bravest, most talented at responding artistically to social movements around her nearly all of her life, and one of the most honest about her tribulations.
She describes growing up in New York as a daughter of Jewish refugees, arriving back in 1914. She instinctively took a job at an interracial kids’ camp in the Catskills, the summer before entering college. Already, she overcame her parents’ resistance and went on a chartered bus to DC to protest the HUAC hearings on the antiwar movement in 1966. When she packed up later in the summer to attend the SDS convention in Clear Lake, Iowa (I was there, too, although we did not meet), it was her first real time away from home for more than a night.
“Topping tyrants 101,” pp.17-24, is a strip or story about her youthful political rebellion and the trouble that it caused in her family. It appeared in a 2007 issue of World War 3 Illustrated. By the time that it appeared, she had long since become a struggle-hardened political veteran.
She traveled to Amsterdam to meet with the Provos, and on to San Francisco with the paper called The Movement before moving back to New York, doing collage covers for the Guardian and, after it had been taken over by women, the tabloid known as The Rat. By the time she drew her second extended comic story— only six pages, but what a rich six pages!—she could recount the struggles of New York feminists at a Bridal Fare, and again at McSorleys, a famous tavern, until then “Men Only.”
This reviewer takes special interest and sympathy in her life as a nurse because of my mother’s life as an ill-treated nurse denied work for her union sympathies. Trained in New York, our protagonist went off to Baltimore to improve the conditions of poor mothers. There, having discarded a first husband for straying (she is nothing but candid), she met her second, and lifetime love match: Paul Bietila, a draft-resisting anti-war activist and Finnish-American from Northern Michigan. In movement after movement, especially after shifting her base to Milwaukee where her husband entered graduate school, she made posters, constructed objects for guerilla theater, and set herself for a further lifetime of work.
She had already become a school nurse in Milwaukee when she recorded, artistically, the story she was living, the defense of the nearby river and wetlands from the plan for a giant shopping center. Local Democrats pretended to protect the river and land, then did the exact opposite, the usual story. Nature and the good people lost, and yet the struggle goes on, most notably, in Northern Wisconsin where this effort has always coincided with a defense of Native American rights and lands, in a large but thinly-populated zone of historic natural resource exploitation.
Thus the cover of the book, “No Mine on Wisconsin’s Wolf River.” This is the story of the rare victory over mining/corporate interests. The struggle to defeat the Crandon Mine brought together a remarkable coalition of indigenous peoples, environmentalists, young and old social activists and feminist groups. By 2023, a celebration of twenty years holding strong in victory, the nearby Chippewa and Potawatomie gatherings included many of our artist’s creations or photographs of those heroes gone.
The victory had one key element of a possible coalition: rivers and lakes polluted by mining do not create conditions for fish that could or should be eaten. As late as thirty years ago, the KKK held rallies around Hurley, a former mining and lumbering town where, even today, the presence of more strip clubs per capita than anywhere else, testifies to the rough character of the town and region. To win over the white population demands persistence and success in making the argument that the “social license to operate” (p.91) must outweigh pure profit. Bietila’s artworks contributed meaningfully to that end.
Thus the “Northwoods Tale,” pp. 92 to 101, a sustained, serious work of comic art, and an example for other artistic activists to study, not to copy in form and content but to study.
Bietila goes onward, from campaign to campaign. The most sustained piece, “Living in the Oil Blast Zone,” pp.137-46, uses her experiences meeting indigenous people, developing her art and her own experiments, to illuminate the ruthlessness of the railway corporations. Derailments, the catastrophic accidents, do not happen “accidentally.” They are the predictable result of smaller crews, aging equipment and the mad rush to expand profits. “Countless railroad bridges cross water” (p.144) and there we find the real crisis for surrounding populations, human and otherwise. A giant heron puppet used in dances inspired an equally giant sturgeon puppet, carrying messages that get across to wide populations.
Naturally, inevitably, Bietila played a vital role in the “Water Protectors” movement to defend the water of the Mackinac Straits in Michigan’s UP, the Upper Peninsula. In a way,she had always been preparing for this struggle,and in another way, preparing herself psychologically for defeat. We can remember Obama, facing a major decision on the new oil line, telling reporters he was going to see “how it plays out.”
Bietila is stoic while heroic. She tells us in the book’s Postscript that Paul Bietila died in his sixties, most likely from environmentally-based cancer. She carries his memory with her and still mourns. But she has two sons, a librarian and a regional organic farm hand. She proudly reflects that in Milwaukee, she has plenty of neighbors supporting the Palestinians as well as opposing ICE. She is home.
