[lit-ideas] How about historical insight instead of racist stereotypes?

From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tue, 2 May 2006 22:21:19 +0900

<<<From Slate>>>

The Roots of May Day
Today's marchers are liberals' best hope.
By Nelson Lichtenstein
Posted Monday, May 1, 2006, at 4:10 PM ET


Immigration protest

Today's May Day marches are putting millions on the street and have
politicized more people than anything since the height of the civil
rights movement. Like every other massive social protest in American
history, the events have generated their share of fear. Democrats and
some leaders of D.C.-based immigrant groups worry that the call to
boycott work and shut down Latino-dependent businesses will generate a
backlash. Republicans and nativists see them as un-American.

But all this is beside the point, a tiff that misses the marches'
transformative impact. These May Day demonstrations and boycotts
return the American protest tradition to its turn-of-the-20th-century
ethnic proletarian origins—a time when, in the United States as well
as in much of Europe, the quest for citizenship and equal rights was
inherent in the fight for higher wages, stronger unions, and more
political power for the working class.

Because today's marches are on a workday, they recall the mass strikes
and marches that turned workers out of factories that convulsed
America in the decades after the great railway strike of 1877, the
first national work stoppage in the United States. Asserting their
citizenship against the autocracy embodied by the big railroad
corporations, the Irish and Germans of Baltimore and Pittsburgh burned
roundhouses and fought off state militia in a revolt that frightened
both the rail barons and the federal government. Hence the
19th-century construction of all those center-city National Guard
armories, with rifle slits designed to target unruly crowds. The
protesters wanted not only higher pay and a recognized trade union but
a new birth of egalitarian freedom. Indeed, May Day itself, as an
international workers holiday, arose out of a May 1, 1886, Chicago
strike for the eight-hour workday. The fight for leisure—clearly lost
today—was a great unifying aspiration of the immigrant workers
movement a century ago with its slogan, "eight hours for work, eight
hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will."

The largest mobilization of immigrant workers in U.S. history occurred
in 1919, when President Woodrow Wilson's rhetorical celebration of
self-determination and "industrial democracy," or self-rule at the
workplace, echoed across steel districts from Homestead, Pa., to Gary,
Ind. Strike organizers printed their handbills in 15 different
languages. Immigrant churches and working-class lodge halls served as
soup kitchens. The strikers called the mounted police "Cossacks." All
these eruptions, which would successfully Americanize millions of
immigrants in the 1930s, blended trade unionism, ethnic
self-consciousness, and the demand for full citizenship. That unity
proved essential for a long season of New Deal hegemony. And that's
why this spring's awakening of a new generation of immigrant
working-class half-citizens holds such promise for liberals.

The last of these great labor-strike demonstrations came in 1947. On
an April workday, the United Automobile Workers flooded Detroit's
Cadillac Square with more than a quarter million of its members to
protest congressional enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act, which curbed
union strike power and disqualified radicals from labor leadership.
Most laborites called Taft-Hartley a "slave labor law." Then as now,
the leaders of the demonstration were divided over tactics. The left,
and not just those oriented toward the Communists, wanted to shut down
the factories so that American unions could deploy, as one top UAW
officer put it, "the kind of political power which is most effective
in Europe." More cautious unionists, led by UAW President Walter
Reuther, sought a huge demonstration but one that began only after
workers clocked out for the day. Capitalizing on these internal
divisions, and on the early Cold War hostility to labor radicalism and
political insurgency, the auto companies took their pound of flesh.
They fired key militants and cut off the tradition of white,
working-class strike demonstrations in industrial cities for the rest
of the 20th century.

For our generation, as for the one before it, the idea that we might
change the conditions of work life and the structure of politics has
seemed either radical fantasy or Parisian self-indulgence.
Celebrations of May Day, the holiday that embodies that imagined link,
have been consigned to the most self-conscious and marginal radicals.
In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 "Law Day" so
as to snuff out any proletarian embers that might have continued to
smolder through the Cold War.

The 1960s civil rights and anti-war movements kept their distance from
workplace actions, which became the province of an increasingly stolid
and constrained trade unionism. The protests of that era were almost
always held on weekends. The 1963 March on Washington, where Martin
Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, took place on a
sweltering Saturday afternoon. There were plenty of protest signs paid
for by the union movement, but no factories shut down that day. The
same is true of the big anti-war marches, and American feminists and
gay-rights advocates have continued that tradition. The linkage
between workplace protest and civil engagement has been broken—one
reason that the boycotts and work stoppages today seem so novel and
controversial.

When weekday work stoppages did take place, their marginality, and
even alienation, from mainstream America was revealing. Arab workers
put down their tools in June 1967 to protest U.S. support of Israel in
the midst of the Six Day War. Millions of black workers left work when
they learned of MLK's assassination on April 4, 1968, but black power
efforts to use the strike to build a radical movement on the assembly
lines largely failed in Detroit a year later. Today's marches and
boycotts are restoring to May Day something of its old civic meaning
and working-class glory. Even some of the most viciously anti-union
employers of Latino labor, like Perdue, Cargill, and Tyson Foods, kept
their factories closed. As in the crucial struggles that began more
than a century ago, today's marches have forged a link among
working-class aspiration, celebrations of ethnic identity, and
insistence on full American citizenship. It's an explosive
combination. And it could revive and reshape liberal politics in our
time.

Nelson Lichtenstein is professor of history at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for Work,
Labor, and Democracy. He is the editor of Wal-Mart: The Face of
Twenty-First-Century Capitalism.
Photograph of protester at immigration rally by Joshua Lott/AFP/Getty Images.

--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
Yokohama 220-0006, JAPAN
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[lit-ideas] How about historical insight instead of racist stereotypes?

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