Rebel Mother: My Childhood Chasing the Revolution, by Peter Andreas: Book Note
Peter Andreas is the John Hay Professor of
International Relations at Brown University, an elite private university in the
US. Born in 1965, he had an
extraordinary childhood following his mother, Carole Andreas (author of Sex and Caste in America) as she chased “the
revolution” through Berkeley communes, three countries in Latin America (Chile,
Argentina, and Peru), and finally into “revolutionary” leftist politics in
Denver. In Rebel Mother (Simon and Schuster, 2017), he has reconstructed that
life through his own memories, his mother’s diaries, and family letters.
Born a Mennonite in 1933, at age seventeen Carole
married a much older Mennonite man, and then left him in the late 1960s after
having had three sons. Her husband obtained legal custody of Peter, but she
kidnapped him twice, once when he was five and again, with his co-operation,
when he was ten. Meanwhile the two much older sons pretty much did want they wanted
from the age of about 14. One, Joel Andreas, at the age of 15 drew a famous
graphic novel about the wealthy Rockefeller family; 100,000 copies were
distributed by NACLA, the leftist North American Committee for Latin America.
Throughout her life Carole Andreas was consumer by
three things: love for her children, sex, and politics. While most people who
were active in “revolutionary” politics in the late 1960s and 70s got over it
later in life, she did not. She took Peter to live in a commune in Berkeley,
California, where one of her lovers was Richard Feinberg, an economist who
twenty years later hired Peter for an internship in a Washington, D.C. think-tank.
Later she moved to Allende’s Chile, after the 1973coup d’état decamping to Argentina
and then Peru. In Peru she took a lover twenty years her junior named Raul,
whom she eventually married. She also had some contacts with the Maoist leftist
group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), later revealed to have committed many
crimes against humanity. Peter spent much of his childhood listening to Carole
and Raul engage in violent political arguments, followed by raucous love-making
in the same room where he was supposed to be sleeping. Often they lived in very crowded conditions with
generous peasant families.
Eventually Carole and Peter settled in Denver, living
in accommodations that at least had the advantage of indoor plumbing, but were
otherwise quite meagre. Carole devoted herself to studying all forty-five
volumes of the collected works of Vladimir Lenin, and being involved in
political events such as a 1977 strike at Coors Brewing Company, for which Joel
drew another graphic comic book. Carole
and Joel had political screaming matches too: he took a more Maoist line, while
she claimed that women, and especially gays, were the real vanguard of the revolution.
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| Peter Andreas |
Peter was largely left to his own devices, his mother
ignoring his school performance other than to warn him that to do well in
school was to be elitist. At the age of twelve he was given a loaded gun by a
man he’d met at a bar, and when he showed it to Carole she simply said “learning
to use a gun will prove handy for when the revolution comes” (p. 242). In his room,
thinking the gun empty, Peter lifted it to his head, but then he decided to
check and sure enough, there was one bullet: he gave the gun back the next day.
A supportive teacher made sure that he attended a higher quality high school
than the one Carole wanted him to attend because it was working class: from
there, he made his way to university.
Reading about Peter Andreas’ extraordinary
childhood, I wanted to rescue him from Carole. I wondered whether his mother
had violated any of what we now know as children’s rights, following the 1989
Convention on the Rights of the Child. There is no children’s right not to have
to use primitive, outdoor toilet facilities. Nor is there any children’s right
not to sleep in a crowded room with several other people, and even farm
animals. Nor is there a right not to be in the same room when parents are
making love: presumably, this happens all over the world in households that
live in one room. Perhaps there should be a children’s right not to live in a
home with a gun or have access to one, but there’s isn’t.
Nor is there any children’s right to be loved,
although it is much better, of course, if a child is loved. As far as I could
see, Carole Andreas genuinely loved her son, even though her behavior with him
was extremely erratic.
So many of my reasons for wanting to rescue Peter
Andreas from his mother reflected precisely the middle-class values that she
rebelled against. These were values held by his father, with whom Peter stayed
for brief periods, with his own room, clean clothes, indoor plumbing and a regular
routine. Despite enjoying this security, he agreed to conspire with his mother
on his second kidnapping because he thought she needed him more than his father
did.
Peter himself wrote of his mother:
“In some ways she did fall into some ‘bad mothering.’
A child should not feel that he must let his mother kidnap him in order to
secure her love, or be a nightly witness to his mother’s political screaming matches
and marital passions, or bear the weight of her suicidal thoughts. A child
should not be allowed to play with a loaded gun because it is ‘good training for
the revolution’….He should not have to defy his mother’s ideological insistence
that he attend a bad high school because it is more ‘working class.’ All in all,
a child needs more stability that to live in three states and five countries in
more than a dozen different homes and schools between the ages of five and
eleven.” (p. 319)
Yet throughout the book, it is clear that Peter and
his mother loved each other very much. And he could not be the scholar he is
today had he not had these extraordinary childhood experiences.
