Quote of the Day (Alan Garfield, on Unions, Corporations and the Free-Market Economy)

“Misbehavior by individual unions does not undermine unions’ inherent value any more than corporate misbehavior undermines corporations’ value.  Both institutions play a vital role in a free market economy: one for organizing labor and the other for organizing capital.  Society should rein in abuses by either institution. But law-abiding unions and corporations should be encouraged to flourish.”— Prof. Alan Garfield, Widener University Delaware Law School, “Bench Press: Labor Unions and Corporations,” www.DelawareOnline.com, Jan. 7. 2016

For the last 40 years, the labor union movement has been set back on its heels. It's important to keep in mind Prof. Garfield's observation as we celebrate Labor Day. Many of us (this writer certainly included) owe our place in the American middle class to fathers and grandfathers who were union members.

The Minnesota Workers Memorial Garden, at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, is dedicated to all Minnesotans who have given their lives in the workplace. The memorial was created Craig David (mural design), Mark Wickstrom (sculptor), and Jean Garbarini and Jennifer Germain (landscape architects). Ken Lund took this photograph of it on Aug. 15, 2018.

Quote of the Day (Nicholas Kristof, on What We Lost With the Decline of Labor Unions)

“For all their shortcomings, unions midwifed the birth of the middle class in the United States. The period of greatest union strength from the late 1940s through the 1950s was the time when economic growth was particularly robust and broadly shared. Most studies find that at least one-fifth of the rise in income inequality in the United States is attributable to the decline of labor unions.

“Unions were also a formidable political force, and it’s perhaps not a surprise that their enfeebling has been accompanied by a rise in far-right policies that subsidize the wealthy, punish the working poor and exacerbate the income gap.”— Nicholas Kristof, “Trump’s War on Workers,” The New York Times, Aug. 11, 2019

Quote of the Day (Lech Walesa, on ‘Polish Aspirations to Freedom’)

“I think that all nations of the world have the right to life in dignity. I believe that, sooner or later, the rights of individuals, of families, and of entire communities will be respected in every corner of the world. Respect for civic and human rights in Poland and for our national identity is in the best interest of all Europe. For, in the interest of Europe is a peaceful Poland, and the Polish aspirations to freedom will never be stifled. The dialogue in Poland is the only way to achieving internal peace and that is why it is also an indispensable element of peace in Europe.”—Former Polish President, union leader, and democracy icon Lech Walesa, “Nobel Peace Prize Address,” Dec. 11, 1983

Lech Walesa was born 75 years ago today in Popowo, Poland. The arc of his career—first leading the exhilarating battle for freedom in Eastern Europe, then increasingly marginalized in this region as it embraces the worst form of nationalism—is familiar but dismaying.

In 1980, Walesa sparked a series of strikes that won for Solidarity the right to represent workers. The free world cheered again as he endured house arrest and systematic harassment during Polish General Jaruzelski's imposition of martial law. Late in the decade, he proceeded from triumph to triumph, as Solidarity negotiated the right to free elections in Poland. A decade after the Gdansk strike, he became the first freely elected President of Poland. 

Unfortunately, Walesa was less adroit as President than as dissident and union leader. His alienation of former allies and inability to ensure a stable post-communist economy ensured a narrow defeat at the polls in his 1995 re-election bid—ironically enough, to a former communist functionary.

In the wake of that defeat, many believed that the freedoms Walesa had helped secure would survive in his homeland. But, while there has been no going back to Poland’s communist past, the nation has taken another problematic political turn, with the ruling nationalist Law and Justice Party supplanting liberal news anchors and talk-show hosts on state media with more congenial right-wing voices. At the same time, the new leadership also packed the Constitutional Court with five justices of their own liking and, particularly heinously, adopted a law (since modified) restricting public debate on the Holocaust.

Under the new regime, Walesa’s once-bright star has dimmed. He’s been forced to deny accusations that he served as a communist informer in the 1970s before he rose up the union ladder. More recently, he was pointedly excluded from any speaking role at recent anniversary celebrations of Solidarity. 

Poland is “now being destroyed,” Walesa explained to Bloomberg in discussing why, in his mid-70s, he felt compelled to step back into the political arena to monitor his country’s elections. His case illustrates how voters the world over, riven by socioeconomic discontent, might turn away from the liberal free-trade regime that preserved European collective security after WWII.

Quote of the Day (Unionism’s Mother Jones, Helping Mankind ‘To Break His Chains’)

“That is my mission, to do what I can to raise mankind to break his chains. The miners are close to me. The steel workers are. I go among them all. One time when I took up the Mexican question, I went to Congress to save some lives; I had never seen them in my life, but they appealed to me and said, ‘It is up to you, Mother, to save our lives.’ I went up to carry the ‘matter to Congress. It came up before the big committee….[House Committee on Rules Chair] Dalzell said to me, ‘Mother Jones, where do you live?" I said, ‘In the United States, sir.’ ‘What part of the United States?’ said he. I said, ‘Wherever the workers are fighting the robbers, there am I.’ [Loud applause.] ‘Sometimes I am in Arizona fighting the Southern Pacific blood-sucking pirates and thieves,’ said I. ‘Sometimes, I am up on the Steel Range, fighting those murderers and plunderers, sometimes I am in Pennsylvania fighting the robbers and murderers and blood-suckers there, and by the Eternal God we will clean you up and put you out of business.’"—Union organizer Mother Jones, “Speech to Striking Coal Miners,” Charleston, West Virginia, 1912, reprinted in The Radical Reader, edited by Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John McMillian

Today’s income inequality is threatening to hark back to the Gilded Age. On this fraught Labor Day,  with employees cowed and made supine by exported jobs and imported technology, it’s worthwhile to take courage from the full-throated defiance of a white-haired woman in a bonnet of black lace who, despite barely reaching five feet tall, could command any union stage.

This woman (she didn’t take kindly to being called a “lady”—that was a term used by the Rockefellers and their kind to keep grown females complacent, she thought) was known through much of her early life as Mary Harris Jones, but by her mid-40s she had transformed herself into “Mother” Jones (1837-1930). 

For nearly 50 years, whenever workers found themselves in the thick of a fight, she could be counted on to be there. Men a foot taller and half her age took heart from her words (“Your organization is not a praying institution. It's a fighting institution. …Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!” she urged) and her actions (facing down cops and scabs).

The issues facing labor seem to have grown with time. But courage need not be in short supply when the example of this remarkable Irish-born woman is recalled.

Photo of the Day: ‘Garment Worker’ Statue, Midtown Manhattan

With all the talk the last week or two about what statues say about the nature of heroism, it helps to shift perspective a little. For years, it seemed, you had to be in a position of authority—and, better yet, on top of a horse—to rate public representation and honor..

That’s one of the reasons why I was so startled—and determined immediately that I needed to take this picture—when I happened upon the statue The Garment Worker last October. At eight feet tall, this permanent sculpture at 555 Seventh Avenue between 39th and 40th Streets is larger than life, just like the figures of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis that dot so much of the South.

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But Tel Aviv-born sculptor Judith Weller did something revolutionary, I’d argue, with this work. She could have honored someone famous associated with the Fashion or Garment District where this bronze statue stands, such as David Dubinsky, the longtime president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union. Instead, she brought to the surface the heroism of an ordinary worker, a man sitting at a sewing machine, putting together a garment.

The worker is intent on his task, but we know there is so much more to him. He is a stand-in for all the fathers who endured all so that their children and grandchildren could have a better shot at life than the one he had. (Indeed, Weller drew on her own memories of her father in fashioning this, including the sign of his faith: a yarmulke.) His fingers and strong, not unlike those of Abraham Lincoln in DC's Lincoln Memorial. 

That strength implies that this worker can be depended on not just by a family, but by a community, is the labor movement, a force badly weakened now but one which did so much once to increase solidarity, to protect workers from hazardous conditions, and to narrow the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

One of the things I enjoy about large cities such as New York and Washington is the chance to come across something unexpected when you are on your way to seeing something else. That is how I stumbled across this image. I’m grateful I had that unexpected opportunity—though not have as grateful as I am to Weller’s father, my own, and the millions of others across the years who demonstrated the strength and dignity of work.

Happy Labor Day. 

Movie Quote of the Day (Karl Malden in “On the Waterfront,” On Contemporary Crucifixions)

Father Pete Barry (played by Karl Malden): “Some people think the Crucifixion only took place on Calvary. Well, they better wise up!”—On the Waterfront (1954), screenplay by Budd Schulberg, directed by Elia Kazan

The American Express commercials that Karl Malden made for two decades might have earned him financial security for his old age. And his performance as Blanche DuBois’ lonely suitor Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire might have won him his Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

But for me, the versatile character actor—who died four days ago, following the far-more publicized celebrity deaths of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett-Majors and, of course, Michael Jackson-- is inextricably linked with On the Waterfront, which ranks with A Man for All Seasons as my favorite film.

For all the latter’s brilliance, though, Elia Kazan’s movie has a far more tangible claim on my affection and interests: at times, it feels like a documentary of the milieu and times associated with my mother and her siblings in the first half of this century.

The parochial schools that Terry Malloy (played by Marlon Brandon) and Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint, pictured here with Malden) recall attending as children were the kind that the Lenihans attended in New York. The pigeon coops that fascinate Terry also provided a rooftop hobby for my Uncle Pete. Another one of my uncles, Ben, witnessed some of the 36-day location shooting in Hoboken, N.J., as a Port Authority cop. The dispiriting “shape-up” routine and corrupt dock union bosses in the film also drained the energy of my grandfather Michael on a daily basis.

And the priest, Fr. Barry, would have wielded the same moral authority that other clerics did in the South Bronx churches where the family worshipped from the Twenties to the Fifties. The quote above is part of his powerful sermon calling shamed but scared laborers to account as they behold their own version of martyrdom: the corpse of a co-worker who tried to tell the truth about the brutality they faced every day.

Malden passed away on the 25th anniversary of the death of the tough priest who inspired his character Fr. Barry, Fr. John Corridan. When they met Corridan as they hunted for background details to flesh out a story based on Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of waterfront extortion and violence, Kazan and Schulberg couldn’t believe at first that such a committed, street-smart figure could be a cleric. (Fr. Barry’s “Crucifixion” speech is, in fact, largely based on Corridan’s speech to union workers after one of them took his advice by standing up to the bosses.)

The presence of two other cast members, Lee J. Cobb (union boss Johnny Friendly) and Rod Steiger (Terry Malloy’s mobbed-up brother Charlie) in the Best Supporting Actor category made it well-nigh impossible for Malden to put another Oscar on his mantelpiece. Yet, perhaps more than the other two, he possessed the crucial role in the film’s plot.

If Johnny Friendly is the brutish force that lays waste to everything and Charlie is the compromiser who loses his soul and his life in the bargain, then Fr. Barry is the prodding, indomitable conscience of the movie.

The brilliance of On the Waterfront as sheer craft—Leonard Bernstein’s powerful score, the much-imitated dialogue (“I coulda been a contender), and Kazan’s always adept hand with actors—blinds many students of film to a perhaps more important aspect of the movie: In insisting that we cannot escape the consequences of our actions or inactions, its high moral seriousness stands as a continuing rebuke to today’s film industry of multimillion-dollar blockbusters and crude, brain-dead “bromances.”

Terry Malloy would rather stay in his chicken coop than face up to the choice that awaits him on the docks. The moral ambiguity of informing—a horror bred into the bones of Irish-Americans from one failed rebellion in their homeland after another—is only reinforced by the ostracism he experiences from co-workers and even from neighborhood kids who despise him as a “stool pigeon.”

The “thorn in the flesh” in St. Paul is manifested in Terry’s anguish over involvement with the death of Joey, the brother of Eva Marie Saint’s character Edie. But, though his "thorn" might save Terry, like the apostle, from self-righteousness, he also cannot let it prevent him from doing what he must: suffer humiliation and mortification of the flesh on his own road to Calvary.

Beaten to a pulp by Friendly’s thugs, Terry stumbles and falls, like Christ carrying his cross. Even Brando’s face in this final scene replicates Christian imagery in its multiple bloody wounds.

Malden liked to joke about his unglamorous looks and blue-collar background (he was the only ex-milkman that Vivien Leigh ever kissed, he claimed), but it served him well in embodying how a distinctly ordinary man could rise up and inspire others to perform extraordinary deeds.

The man he emulated (even to the point of wearing his hat and coat), Fr. Corridan, changed the perceptions of everyone with whom he came in contact, and what it meant to be a priest and even a Christian. Not a bad example for the rest of us Terry Malloys.

This Day in Labor History (Molly Maguires Infiltrated)

October 27, 1873—Using the alias James McKenna, James McParlan, a minor Pinkerton National Detective Agency operative relegated to spotting crooked conductors on Chicago trolleys, boarded a Reading coach headed for the coal country of Pennsylvania. The assignment he eventually carried out, in stunning fashion: to infiltrate the Molly Maguires, an Irish-American group believed to be waging a campaign of violence against mine operators and policemen.

Whether the "Mollies" actually existed--and to what extent--remains a lively question. The high rate of violence in Schuykill County--142 unsolved murders from 1862 to 1877--might argue in its favor. But, as John A. Barnes notes in Irish-American Landmarks: A Traveler’s Guide, this was hardly out of the ordinary for mining regions, even in areas with a comparatively small Irish presence.

What is inarguable, however, is the two different forms of desperation that led management and labor to clash.

It’s easy to see how labor felt constrained. The 50,000 coal miners in eastern Pennsylvania as the 1870s began had to cope with the following:

* Hopelessly inadequate safety precautions;
* Flooded shafts and cave-ins;
* Less than a dollar a day in pay for 14-to-16-hour days;
* As many as eight children crammed into small huts;
* Early deaths from black lung;
* Lack of sympathy from a government that in those years was committed to laissez-faire.

But both McParlan and his company were, in their own way, desperate. Allan Pinkerton, facing looming bankruptcy because of the economic distress sweeping the U.S. that year, looked for a badly needed cash infusion in what was becoming a specialty of his: union-breaking. After six years in the U.S., tiring of small-time jobs, the slight, bespectacled McParlan hoped this assignment would lead to something more.

One hundred thirty-five years after his fateful journey, McParlan remains a particularly vivid example of one of the most persistent and troubling figures throughout Irish and Irish-American history: the informer. The 1970 film that centered on his dilemma, named, of course, The Molly Maguires, follows a line of Celtic self-questioning in cinema that has also included John Ford's The Informer (with Victor McLaglen's Oscar-winning performance as the title character) and David Lean's Ryan's Daughter (with Leo McCarey playing the guilty party).

I'm not sure why director Martin Ritt didn't do a better job with this film. He certainly had a fine pair of leads in Richard Harris and Sean Connery (playing, retrospectively, McParlan and the man he betrayed, Jack Kehoe). Ritt's own status as the victim of an informer, during Hollywood's blacklist period, certainly gave him sympathy with a wronged class. But, even aside from the nearly impenetrable accents involved, this film does not live. (The one point of interest might be the presence of future author Malachy McCourt as a bartender.)

I recommend the late J. Anthony Lukas' essay on the film in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (general editor: Mark Carnes). His essay nicely summarizes the historical revisionism that has sought to understand the roots of a bitter management-labor conflict seen at the time through the lens of dime-store novels and a Protestant-leaning populace that, then as now, is happy to rely on cheap labor but anxious that this has necessitated an influx of disenfranchised outsiders.

Over the last ten years, while visiting my friend Jimmy in the Schuylkill River area, I rode through land that had served as the flash point for the struggle over the "Mollies." The region exhibited signs everywhere of the human toll taken by the collapse of the Rust Belt in the late '70s and early '80s, but when I learned its prior history, it seemed haunted by something even more tragic.

Jimmy lived at the time in Orwigsburg, nearby Pottsville. At the Sheridan House in the latter town, McParlan/McKenna made the acquaintance of members of the group he would betray. Nearly three years later, McParlan's trial testimony in Pottsville would help send some of these men to the gallows.

Two paragraphs ago, I referred to the area being “haunted.” In one sense, an element of the supernatural has given rise to a local legend. County Donegal native Alec Campbell , convicted of being an accessory in the murder of a mine company official, protested his innocence so vigorously that he even left his imprint on the cell wall. His final words supposedly were: “That mark of mine will never be wiped out. There it will remain forever to shame the country that is hanging innocent men.” As of 1995, when Barnes wrote his historical travel guide, that imprint remained embedded in Carbon County Jail in Mauck Chunk (now called Jim Thorpe), Pa.

Pottsville would give rise, three decades later, to a self-described "Doctor's Son," John O'Hara—to my mind, the short-story writer unsurpassed in the 20th century for his understanding of men and women from all walks of life. It's been a long time since I saw the film—which, in any case, mangled his novel—but for me the greatest cry of the heart in BUtterfield 8 occurs when O'Hara's alter ego, James Malloy, lays bare the unease that he grew up with in town:

"America, being a non-Irish, anti-Catholic country, has its own idea of what a real gangster looks like, and along comes a young Mick [i.e., James Cagney] who looks like my brother, and he fills the bill. He is the typical gangster….At least it's you American Americans' idea of a perfect gangster type, and I suppose you're right. Yes, I guess you are. The first real gangsters in this country were Irish. The Molly Maguires. Anyway do you see what I mean by all this non-assimilable stuff?"

It was the tragedy of 19th-century Irish-Americans that they reenacted the anguish of their ancestral homeland with descendants of their tormenters.

In Boston, they encountered the scions of the Puritans, who, under Oliver Cromwell, had carried out a campaign of dispossession in Ireland so fierce, giving the inhabitants the Hobbesian choice, "To hell or Connaught."

Legend has it that the Molly Maguires began as an anti-landlord organization in Ireland of the Famine years. In eastern Pennsylvania, recent Famine immigrants or children of this group suffered at the hands of Franklin B. Gowen, the Protestant Irish president of the Philadelphia and Pinkerton Railroad, whose stranglehold on the manufacture and production of coal in the region must have reminded them more than a little of the landlords they fled.

At the time, it seemed that the three figures responsible for breaking this secret society had gotten what they wanted. Gowen linked the Workingman's Benevolent Association with the Mollies, a group now seen as murderous. Pinkerton would go on to become a detective agency with all the work it could handle in those anti-union times. McParlan became manager of the agency's Western Division in Denver, where 30 years later, he would gather evidence implicating the I.W.W.'s "Big Bill" Haywood in the conspiracy to murder the governor of Idaho.

Historians increasingly agree that the 20 men executed for their part in the Mollies were railroaded. (Not a single Irish-American was enpaneled on the juries.) Kehoe, executed for the murder of a mine foreman, would be pardoned more than a century later by Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp, who took note of the coal miners' desperate plight and Gowen's fear of one of their most popular champions.

And Gowen? He committed suicide, six years after losing his job with the railroad.