Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s, A Thousand Days, - A Comment

Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s, A Thousand Days, - A Comment

In Arthur Schlesinger’s memoir of his years as an advisor to President John F. Kennedy, A Thousand Days, he wrote about the right wing as he saw them in 1965, the year of publication. You might get a sense of Déjà vu.

From page 750:

“The burst of right-wing activity in the early sixties was a predictable historical phenomenon. In conservative periods, like the fifties, the radical right was characteristically disorganized and dormant. Its members were soothed by the eternal hope that a conservative administration might do something they would like.” . . .
“But the election of a progressive administration generally has a galvanizing effect on the radical right. It grows desperate, convinced that the nation is in mortal danger, that it is five minutes before midnight, that it must rally and resist before it is too late.” . . .

He went on with “I first heard of the John Birch Society in an early warning letter of December 1960 from that fine old progressive Republican Alfred M. Landon. One heard a great deal more of it in the months following. The radical right appealed equally to the incoherent resentment of the frightened rich and the anxious middle class. It flourished particularly in states like California and Texas, overflowing over raw new money; in states like Arizona and Florida, where older people had retired on their pensions; in small towns in the mountain states, where shop keepers felt harassed by big business, big labor, and big government. The mood is one of longing for a dreamworld of no communism, no overseas entanglements, no United Nations, no federal government, no labor unions, no Negroes or foreigners – a world in which Chief Justice Earl Warren would be impeached, Cuba invaded, the graduated income tax repealed, the fluoridation of water stopped and the import of Polish hams forbidden.”

Remember this was written in 1965

Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

 Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, (NY: Harper-Collins, 2022), 383 pages

Imani Perry teaches a variety of courses in gender, law, public affairs and jazz studies as a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her book South to America has elements of a memoir, black history, black culture and a travelogue. Travelogue applies given section and chapter titles have the names of regions, states and cities she visited and writes about: Section I. just below the Mason-Dixon line, Section II. the mid-south, Section III. the south along the water including Cuba and the Bahamas.

In Appalachia, Perry visits Harper’s Ferry where she narrates the history of John Brown’s raid. The raid, its failure, and Brown’s execution are familiar to many, but Perry fills in some lessor known details like the participation of two black men, Shields Green and John Copeland, executed for their part in the raid.  Readers learn freedman built a one room school house at Harper’s Ferry in 1866. The school became Storer college, a historic black college. In 1906, the Niagara Movement for racial justice met there with W.E.B. Dubois and William Monroe Trotter in attendance. Perry writes the story of this conference. To them John Brown was a hero that made it possible for blacks to envision freedom.

Perry shifts to narrating a walk about Harpers Ferry and along the Shenandoah River. During her walk she encounters a Civil War re-enactor on the Confederate side taking the day off from his job in Washington, D.C. She dubs him Bob and describes their hour or so of cautious conversation before reflecting on the search for identity for Appalachia and the black people that live there.  Commentary ranges widely such as a midnight walk through an Appalachian Walmart, comments on Appalachia by Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe, a discussion of Appalachian coal mining, strikes and violence that brought momentary black and white class solidarity and a lengthy discussion of the Highlander School.

This Appalachian chapter has the characteristics of all the chapters. It has stories related to the chapter’s region and the black community there. She writes varied commentary of her visits with family, friends or the strangers she meets, which she reflects on as a black woman born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1972 and raised in the south. The chapters are sprinkled with a variety of seldom mentioned black accomplishments. I learned that a black jockey, Issac Burns Murphy, won the Kentucky Derby three times and that two black bartenders invented the recipe for the mint julep. She reflects on the music of Chuck Berry and James Brown and their seldom recognized influence on the music of Elvis Presley.

Stories and reflections come with reminders that race and class figure prominently in American history and contradict our ideals such as the Virginia chapter where Perry quotes a seldom quoted part of Thomas Jefferson’s biography: his racist views of black people. Many know of the Dred Scott case, but not his life on an Alabama plantation or what happened to his children after they were separated. That 380 acre plantation became Oakwood University and might be the site of their remains, but Perry reflects it does not matter “there are gallons of sorrow in the soil.”

 

Some of Perry’s stories reveal someone wrestling with class and its relation with race as it plays out today. Remember southern white boys fought and died by the thousands to save slavery for wealthy plantation owners, but those well-to-do plantation owners offered only one reward: whites could be above black people in the social class hierarchy. Trump reminds us that insistence remains in the United States of 2024, as Professor Perry so well knows.

As an educated member of the professional class Perry tells a story of attending a writing retreat in Louisville, Kentucky with a group of black women professors. “By the external measure, we were a group of Black women who had scaled the heights.  . . . Some of us could trace our ancestries back to the plantations here, others to plantations in the Caribbean.  . . . Some came from elite families, most from struggling ones, all from people who eked out from under the race and gender rules. The past for us was something sorrowful and beautiful at once.”

At the end of their retreat, they took a tour of distilleries; Perry called it a bourbon tour. “I loved it. The science, the aging process, the history. The scent was intoxicating.” . . . But then, she relates “In retrospect, knowing what I know now, and reflecting on the sensory and social pleasure of that visit, I feel uncomfortable.” On the tour she learned these Kentucky distilleries emerged during slavery and depended on slave labor. “Don’t we always need to look round the back to see what made all this happen? Should I have reveled so easily in the bourgeois luxury?  . . . “This is a bit of navel-gazing, but if you gaze anywhere with a critical eye, you do have to look at your own belly, too.”

The narrative has lots of navel-gazing, or as I would call it, reflecting on race relations in a personal way, as an insider. In more navel-gazing Perry reflects on a trip to the Bahamas and the gulf between her and the black women that worked at her hotel. “It is an uncomfortable feeling.  Being an African-American, even an upper-middle class African American, often insulates you from the guilt of empire. After all, ‘we,’ in any collective sense, have never been the ruling class.  . . . But the truth is that relaxing in a multinational hotel makes me a part of the problem that people like [the maid for my room] have to manage, and for too small a compensation. I became her monster and she is mine, though she is blameless.  Because just a generation ago, my people were her. I’ve laid claim to a heritage that includes women situated just as she is, yet here I am one of her exploiters.”

The book coheres as a memoir because so much of the narrative covers Perry’s personal feelings and includes commentary of her experience and of her family’s experience as part of the black community, and on writers, composers, and activists connected to black history and culture. She quotes from, and comments on, people both black and white like W.E.B. Dubois, Ida B. Wells, H. L. Mencken, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, June Jordan, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison and many more. There are no footnotes, no bibliography, as would be required of academic writing, and no “academize” to burden the reader.

The book’s narrative stays below the Mason-Dixon line as the subtitle, A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, suggests it will. Readers will find dozens of stories of white, mostly male, discrimination against blacks. Some are mid length; some are short. Some come from long ago; some are more current. Among recent cases include discussion and comments on the murderer of Trayvon Martin, the Duke Lacrosse rape case, and the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor: “Our hearts broke for Breonna.” While the book has no obvious thesis if what Perry narrates of the south applies to the soul of the nation, then America continues to be racist.

Even so there are quite a few millions of white people who have, or had, black classmates as students, have black colleagues at work, and more and more have black neighbors. These whites can feel accepting, respectful and friendly toward the black people they know, even as they avoid thinking about white racist misconduct. Let me suggest the moderate tone in her writing and naval-gazing brings an optimistic note to the end of the book, and an invitation for whites to rethink what should be the soul of the nation.

Contact

 For inquiries about this blog from the blogger or the author of The Fight Over Jobs, 1877-2024: An Accounting of Events Distorted, Suppressed or Ignored contact Fred Siegmund at the email address,

 AFS19250 AT yahoo.com. Electronic copies of the book are available free upon request to this email address.

Trump, Corporate America and the Upper Class

 Trump, Corporate America and the Upper Class - with a post election addendum below(See below)

In his first crusade to be president Donald Trump campaigned with a list of Democratic proposals the Republican establishment hates and blocked during the Obama years. He attacked American business moving jobs overseas during the campaign along with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and trade agreements in general. Neither the Republican nor Democratic parties, nor any of its presidents care to challenge the demand of corporate America to shut down plants and operations in the United States and move them to Mexico or China or anywhere they want to go, but Trump’s threat attracted support from angry and alienated voters. He added to this appeal by insisting he would build a border wall to cut immigration in direct opposition to corporate America that can’t get enough of that cheap foreign labor.

Trump called NAFTA a “disaster” and the “worst agreement ever negotiated,” He threatened to have the United States withdraw without the changes he demanded. On May 18, 2017 he gave the legally required 90-day notification to begin re-negotiation. Trump claimed he could benefit American labor by eliminating NAFTA trade deficits with new policy in a new NAFTA agreement. Keeping corporate America’s production and investible capital in the United States creating American jobs appealed to an angry working class.

When real negotiations got underway all parties proposed moderate changes with revised language without changing NAFTA’s free trade philosophy. Corporate America was there watching to make sure changes would be acceptable while giving public relations deference to their brush off to Trump’s populist appeal.

Trump’s attacks on immigration and American corporations moving jobs overseas during the campaign came as a complement to his attacks on the NAFTA trade agreement. His campaign promises to the working class that voted for him required that he fight corporate America and the Republican Party establishment and be aggressive in his efforts to restrict the flow of immigrants, especially Hispanic immigrants coming from and through Mexico.

Once in office corporate America continued hiring undocumented aliens with impunity while remaining silent and letting Trump and Republicans demonize and debase Mexicans and Mexican families to suit his political purposes. He decided separating families and holding young children in detention would be a good threat and public relations strategy for his purposes while corporate America looked the other way knowing his threats were tall talk of no benefit to the working class.

These Trump failures help demonstrate Republican presidents do not, and cannot, serve populist appeals. It also left corporate officials to continue doing as they please to invest abroad or to pressure cities and states to compete against each other to get socialist subsidies for roads, water, sewers, property tax cuts and other benefits as a condition of investing capital in one place over another. They make these demands expecting to leave at any time and wreck lives, housing and property markets in the process. Maybe Trump had a point: unregulated free trade equals cheap labor at the expense of the working class. Too bad he did nothing about it.

 

During the 2016 presidential campaign corporate America supported Trump despite his populist talk. Once in office Trump's conduct resembled his campaign with regular appearances directing personal abuse at objectors and preening himself as a genius. He continued as well to hold true believer rallies filled with lies and fabrications while making no secret of his refusal to read security or policy documents prepared for him or to study anything. With no previous experience in government and so much of his time spent talking or tweeting he did remarkably little governing.

As his 2017-2021 term passed Trump accepted what all presidents accept as president; they are expected to carry out the corporate agenda without objections or questions. Corporate America remained happy and content with him since they controlled economic policy and Congress and got everything they wanted from government while Trump otherwise played the role of corporate helpmate, or errand boy depending on point of view. Except for having a president offering a daily dose of useless vulgarity and personal abuse to minorities and objectors, the country continued as usual and the macro economy did well, mostly thanks to Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell. As the 2024 election approaches, we might suppose all could remain the same for another term of Trump as president. However, the events of January 6, 2021 intervened, bringing doubt to any thesis that a second term could only be as bad as the first.

The events of January 6 and his repeated demands to violate and terminate the U.S. Constitution since then prevent him from being a legitimate candidate for president. Recall the oath of office written into Title II of the Constitution: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Whether he would recite the oath of office on January 20, which he may refuse to do, remains irrelevant after a violent attack on the Congress. Even though Trump lost the popular vote, or what is really the democratic vote, in both the 2016 and 2020 elections and will lose the democratic vote in 2024, corporate America made him a candidate hoping to exploit the Electoral College and get him back in office. In spite of these constitutional questions corporate America and their media want Trump. If they wanted him out he would be gone, but corporate America got what they wanted in his first term and they expect to have the same control in a second term.

Before January 6 Trump praised others in their racist views and promoted violence by others, but January 6, 2021 was distinctly different. He organized his followers to attack the capital and extensive video coverage establishes they acted with confidence and impunity while expecting to be protected by Trump as part of their devotion to his authoritarian ways. They offered no agenda beyond over throwing a national election in Trump’s behalf, nor a word or a thought of policy. The evidence of his active involvement from the January 6 attacks, and since then, guarantees a significantly more threatening and violent second term compared to the first.

To build an Electoral College win Trump and the Republicans know they have the white racist vote. Some of America’s racist whites call themselves white supremacists, but many others merely whine and complain black people get unfair advantage from policies intended to create equal opportunity regardless of race, creed or color. Make America Great Again means Make America a white male dictatorship again. Republicans have also attracted those who demand unrestricted access to guns and assault rifles and those who want to ban access to prenatal care and abortion. At least some of these voters overlap with white racists and cannot be expected to enlarge the racist vote totals enough to elect Trump. Trump needs more than the racist-gun-antiabortion vote to get back in office, even with the advantages of the Electoral College.

To win Trump needs the additional votes of upper class white Republicans, many of whom do not care for his foul mouth or overtly racist talk. These are the wealthy and the professional well-to-do living in suburban enclaves with all the education and experience necessary to understand what Trump stands for and his threat to the domestic and international order. Some of these lifelong Republicans will vote for Harris as a result, but significant numbers will not. The upper class Republicans that vote for Trump do so expecting him and his corporate allies to protect their privileges. They show no reservation how much of their privilege result from three tax cuts: the 1986 Reagan tax cuts, 2003 Bush tax cuts and 2017 Trump tax cuts. Instead they worry a Democrat might raise their taxes or support programs to relieve income and wealth inequality and disrupt their class structure. The combined benefit to the well-to-do amounts to billions and billions reaped from the lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends over these decades; benefits to their compounding growth in consumption that depend on political influence without contributions to the economy and Gross Domestic Product.

If Trump returns to office in 2024 the upper class and well-to-do voters from suburbia will supply the votes that put him there. The racist-gun-antiabortion vote consistently voted for him in 2016 and 2020 and will do so again, but Trump needs the well-to-do suburban voters in key states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. Many of these wealthy are not shy contributing campaign funds or planting Trump signs in front of their mansions, which can be translated into Trump will protect us; the Constitution and democracy mean nothing to us. They brush off Trump’s erratic and violent threats as something that will not affect them and will be controlled by corporate power anyway. That Trump remains a candidate after the January 6 attacks stand for corruption and decay in United States politics and an end of corporate and upper class leadership. Never has the United States sunk this low.

Post Election Addendum

In the original pre-election post I predicted candidate Kamala Harris would win the popular vote but was at risk of losing the Electoral College vote. I was wrong about that, she lost the popular vote as well. The popular vote in 2024 was 75.6 million for Trump and 72.4 million of Harris; two splinter candidates had 1.5 million votes. The 2024 vote total came to 149.4 million down from the 2020 vote total of 158.4 million, the highest vote total in a U.S. presidential election ever. The vote total in 2024 dropped just slightly less than 9 million from 2020.

The Trump vote in 2020 was 74.2 million compared to 75.6 million in 2024. Before the election I expected the same people that voted for him in 2020 would return and vote for him again, which the close vote count suggests they did. If we take President Biden got 81.3 million votes in 2020 compared to candidate Harris with 72.4 million in 2024 then her vote total almost exactly equals the decline in the 2024 vote, 8.9 million. The people who put Biden in office in 2020 stayed home and did not vote. I am supposing they stayed home out of despair or disgust.

In both elections the Trump vote totals came from whites holding varied degrees of racist views, from white supremacist on down to whites whining about minorities getting government advantages while they are left out. He got additional votes from gun people and the anti abortion, evangelicals of the religious right. Add to those the wealthy whites that control corporate assets and wealth and their beneficiaries out in white suburbia voting to protect their stock portfolios, tax subsidies and class privileges. These groups always vote for Republicans. 

The same voters that failed to elect Trump in 2020 elected him in 2024. The 8.9 million that helped put Biden in office in 2020 did so hoping the Democrats would be able to do something for them; they did not. Those 8.9 million voters that stayed home in 2024 come from the working class that go to work all the livelong day and still do not have funds to buy basic necessities, things like groceries. They were never for Trump or he would have been reelected in 2020. True, the Republicans block everything that could help the working class while corporate America funds Republicans and controls their votes in Congress, but Democrats appear too cowardly to even talk about a living wage or take a political risk as advocates for the working class. While Obama and Biden appear as men of good will, they did nothing to relieve the inequality that threatens the country with Trump generated violence. No political party represents the working class. Corporate America has always expected to run the country. Will they capitulate to Trump now?

The Fight Over Jobs, 1877-2024: An Accounting of Events Distorted, Suppressed or Ignored

A new book of labor history is just published in July 2024.

The Fight Over Jobs, 1877-2024: An Accounting of Events Distorted, Suppressed or Ignored

Author Dr. Fred Siegmund

Americans work “at will” and can be fired or laid off at any time. Work and the boss can be difficult; sometimes we strike, picket and protest.  Take the time back in July 1877 after the Pennsylvania Railroad cut wages 20 percent and the Pittsburgh superintendent laid off half his conductors, flagmen and brakemen. Striking crews blocked the tracks, except railroad officials declared to “clear the tracks” and found a compliant governor ready to call out the National Guard. His troops fired directly into the crowds at Pittsburgh’s 28^th Street grade crossing, leaving 16 dead and 27 wounded. Follow along with the “angry surging tide of humanity” descending into the rail yards for three days of arson, looting and rioting. Take a trip through the Sunday aftermath to consider the burned-out ruins of 1,200 freight cars, 126 locomotives and two miles of smoldering Pittsburgh. The Fight Over Jobs narrates these street battles in one strike after another along with the confrontations on the picket line, the shop floor, the bargaining table, in Congress and the courts over the years 1877 to 2024.

Six parts divide the history, further sub divided into twenty-one chapters, which should be treated as evidence for the discussion and frank assertions made about America’s labor and labor relations in Part VII. Part VII, Labor History’s Déjà vu, offers arguments, interpretations, conclusions.

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Part I begins with the Pittsburgh strike, often known as the Great Upheaval, that develops the early era between 1877 and 1913. Four chapters develop the major organizing and strikes of the era that include the 1892 Homestead strike, the Eugene Debs’ American Railway Union and the 1894 Pullman strike that follows. The era includes organizing details of the Industrial Workers of the World and their free speech fights and strikes. Readers meet Mother Jones and the early United Mine Workers organizing and Clare Lemlich leading the uprising and revolt in early textile industry strikes. Part I includes narrative review of the Haymarket bombing and Triangle fire.

Part II covers the years from 1913 to 1921, the Presidential years of Woodrow Wilson.  His first two years in office feature some of labor history’s renown labor battles at Paint Creek and Cabin Creek, West Virginia, Akron, Ohio, Paterson, New Jersey, Keweenaw, Michigan, Wheatlands, California, and Ludlow, Colorado and the legal battle over Joe Hill. A chapter covers President Wilson’s preparedness campaign and then his decisions over wartime labor relations that dominant the years of his first term. In spite of labor’s no strike pledge there were wartime strikes with the Bisbee, Arizona and Butte, Montana strikes providing two especially grim examples. War time labor relations included race riots at East St. Louis and then at Chicago as part of the great migration. Once the war ended in 1918, 1919 turned into another horror of strikes and violence in Seattle Washington, and the fall strikes of the Boston police, steel workers and coal miners ending with the shootings and lynching in Centralia, Washington.

Part III develops labor relations through the three Republican party presidents of 1921 to 1933. These years feature the Republican Party’s determination to neutralize unions in contrast with Lenin’s Russian revolution and the hope to empower unions and the working class. Labor relations in the agriculture, mining and textile industries declined even further in the 1920’s. This chapter narrates the violent Matewan, West Virginia strike featured in the John Sayles film. There were more strikes in the textile industry at Passaic, New Jersey, New Bedford, Massachusetts as well as a celebrated railroad shopman’s strike. In the last chapter of part III, the depression arrives and describes Herbert Hoover’s failure to respond.

Part IV covers the depression era of Franklin Roosevelt and labor relations during WWII for the years of 1933 and 1945. The first Roosevelt plan for recovery brought corporate opposition and strikes and rioting from a desperate working class. Strikes in agriculture came in spite of the Agriculture Adjustment Act and strikes in manufacturing came in spite of the National Industrial Recovery Act. Strikes filled 1934 at Toledo, Ohio, at Minneapolis, Minnesota, at San Francisco, California, and up and down the east coast with more textile strikes. Senator Robert Wagner of New York responded to these failures by steering the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) through Congress in 1935.

Part IV continues with the drive to organize under the new NLRA and the internal, political and legal battles to enforce the law. Narrative includes the Roosevelt court packing plan, the Robert LaFollette Congressional hearings and negotiations and strikes in the rubber, steel and automobile industries. These sections narrate the celebrated Flint sit-down strikes. The success of the sit-down strikes proved to be the high point of the New Deal. The last chapter of part IV narrates the corporate resistance to union organizing and the changes to labor relations during and after World War II.

Part V covers 1945 to 1981 that begins when Harry Truman takes over and the great post war strike wave of 1945-46 begins. It was a tough time for labor with corporate America determined to undue the New Deal. Republicans take over the 80^th Congress and pass the Taft-Hartley Act and then harass labor with Congressional hearings and charges of a communist take over of the labor movement that includes the Joe McCarthy outbreak and the legal assault on Hollywood actors and labor organizers.

Part V continues with Senator McClellan of Arkansas investigating labor racketeering in general and Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters in particular. Narrative here follows Robert Kennedy’s legal pursuit of Jimmy Hoffa and the successful effort to amend labor law with the Landrum-Griffin Act.  By the 1960’s the civil rights, women’s rights and Vietnam war protests joined forces with the labor movement organizing in California with Cesar Chavez and the farm workers, in Memphis, Tennessee with the sanitation workers, in the Detroit auto plants and especially in the 1968 elections.

Once Richard Nixon took over as president, he attempted to court labor in a concerted effort to have the working class vote Republican. The 1970’s labor movement was dominated by law and politics although there were also celebrated strikes like the one at J.P. Stevens. Labor and the working class divided over the McGovern election and the federal courts consistently ruled against labor unions. President Carter only added to their troubles by failing to support labor legislation.

Part VI opens when Ronald Reagan takes office in 1981 and establishes a new era in labor relations that runs to the present. The PATCO strike begins the Reagan era, but narrative turns to the aggressive union busting efforts in the copper industry, the paper industry and the meat parking industry. The 1980’s featured the rise of the service industry unions like Service Employees International Union, the Justice for Janitors campaign and the organizing of support workers at Yale University.

Part VI continues into the 1990’s with the George H.W. Bush era strikes at Eastern Airlines, at Las Vegas in the hospitality industry, at the Pittston Coal company in Virginia and in Decatur, Illinois at Caterpillar Tractor, Bridgestone Tire and Staley Food Products. Strikes continued during the Clinton years, featuring the politics of health care, NAFTA, and labor law legislation along with a couple of celebrated strikes at UPS and the Detroit Newspaper Strike. The second George Bush, a.k.a. W, allowed the anti-union parts of his administration to be active opponents of labor unions and labor organizing. The Bush era also featured internal disputes within the labor movement as Lane Kirkland, Andrew Stern, John Sweeney, John Wilhelm and a few more fought with each other to bring change to a calcified labor movement. The Bush administration gave way to the Obama and Trump administrations, but the focus of politics and labor were the same as they had been since the 1980’s: health care, NAFTA and immigration issues

The book develops labor legislation and labor law in separate sections of Parts I to VI as the law progresses from the 19^th century to the present. The legal narrative explains the principal labor legislation – the Railway Labor Act, National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), Taft-Hartley Act, and Landrum-Griffin Act – and provides a chapter appendix with a readers guide giving condensed versions of the important sections of the laws.

Before Congress passed labor legislation the courts resolved labor disputes with the common law of conspiracy and the 1890 Anti-trust laws to curtail union strikes and organizing. After Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act both labor unions and corporate management attempted to enforce their view of the law by filing unfair labor practice complaints with the newly created National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).  NLRB enforcement allows review in the federal courts and further appeal to the Supreme Court. The book reviews these cases by providing details of the disputes and analyzing the court decisions.  The book follows the law cases covering the legal right to strike, the right to work, the right of free speech in labor relations and the duty to bargain as required by labor statute.

Part VII, entitled Labor History’s Déjà vu, pressures readers to consider common themes among the social, economic and political events of labor history narrated through the book. Part VII confronts readers with America’s class divisions, the narrow minds of economists, the short comings of capitalism and our obsolete Constitution. Part VII confronts inequality of income and civil rights, corporate America’s never-ending quest for cheap labor, and refusal by corporate officials to be leaders in a society they demand to control. It analyzes, defends and supports a living wage.

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This is a long book of 868 pages, with endnotes and index added to that, but a necessary length to bring out the central themes for a long period like 1877 to 2024. It intends to be self-contained and assumes only basic familiarity with U.S. history and political science, but it is not elementary and requires attention to detail. The central themes repeat in the same or similar ways over the many years. To help connect these themes from one era to another, readers are occasionally asked to “Recall” similar events already passed and informed of similar events to come in the future with “as we shall see.” Part and chapters begin with an epigraph specific to events of labor history. They are intended to reinforce these central themes. A few examples should help.

#1 - Joseph A. Dacus, editor, St. Louis Republican, 1878

It is cheap labor, more than any other fact, that most endangers our institutions, cheap labor serving corporate wealth, intent upon nothing but more wealth. Here is where capitalists make the gravest mistake, and the great strikes of the present year should be taken as a wholesome warning. Capitalists consider their direct interest in the cheap labor they hire, and not their indirect interest in the dearer labor that buys what wealth wishes to sell.

#2 - Lyman Trumbull, writing in Public Opinion, October 18, 1894

If the accumulation of fortunes goes on for another generation with the same accelerated rapidity as during the present, the wealth of this country will soon be consolidated in the hands of a few corporations and individuals to as great an extent as the landed interests of Great Britain now are. Neither strikes of the laboring classes, which it controls, nor the governmental control of the great railroad and other corporations, will remove the existing conflict between labor and capital, which has its foundations in unjust laws, enabling the few to accumulate vast estates and live in luxurious ease, while the great masses are doomed to incessant tool, penury, and want.

#3 - Memorandum from Louis Brandeis to President Woodrow Wilson, June 14, 1913

The conflict between the policies of the Administration and the desires of the financiers and of big business, is an irreconcilable one. Concessions to the big business interests must in the end prove futile. The administration can at best have only their seeming or temporary cooperation. In essentials they must be hostile. While we must give the most careful consideration to their recommendations and avail ourselves of their expert knowledge, it is extremely dangerous to follow their advice even in a field technically their own.

#4 - Bayard Rustin, quoted from Commentary, February 1965

“No social movement has ever been successful in thiscountry which did not involve as an ally the hard-core white middle class.”

--------------Available on Amazon or Barnes and Noble in Perfect Bound or epub

The book is available for $19.99 as a special offer to bloggers on this site Buy the Book

American Whitelash

Wesley Lowery, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress, NY: Mariner Books, 2023), 237 pages 

  The book opens by recounting the Grant Park celebration following the 2008 election of President Barak Obama. The narrative contrasts those who saw the election as an opportunity to ease the racial divide with the many white men and a few white women who saw the election as a threat to their identity and class status. The election of a president with a black father and a white mother brought a surge of anger and hatred and paved the way for a Whitelash filled with violence, and Trump. The author quotes Obama from his memoir. “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted.” A quote from a poet and essayist, Camonghne Felix, explains “What we expected of the Obama administration was beyond what the framework of the presidency allowed.” How true. Presidents take an oath to preserve, protect and defend our Constitution, which falsely suggests there is presidential power to do. 

  The book has five parts divided into numbered subsections and an epilogue, all of it covering just 237 pages. Part I establishes the threat of terrorism with a review of white supremacy as practiced in the United States. At the end of Part I Lowery explains the book is “an exploration of the horror that our era has wrought and an attempt to place a decade of American carnage in the context of America history; . . . My goal is to be neither comprehensive nor encyclopedic. This book is an attempt to put human faces on the relentless cycle of violence that has defined American history.” Part I ends at page 27 and readers should know the remaining 210 pages puts a depressing and violent human face on the United States. 

  In part II readers visit Patchogue, Long Island, where they meet Joselo Lucero and his son Marcelo. They are immigrants from Ecuador. Narrative follows a gang of middle class white teens, some with Swastika tattoos, roaming about intentionally looking for victims to assault. One of the group named Jeff Conroy stabbed and killed Marcelo Lucero. The narrative follows a journalist's investigation of the boy's racist and white supremacist views, and the prosecution and trial of a hate crime manslaughter and gang assault. 

  Part II and all the remaining parts fill in related historical material of racism, cite criminology research and provide examples of the current status of white supremacy. Lowery's white supremacy discussion establishes white supremacy as a dangerous and more violent extension of the more common racial prejudice that has always plagued America. 

  Part III - White Radicalization - builds a narrative around the saga of white supremacist Wade Michael Page. Page carried out a mass shooting after invading the temple of Sikhs in Oak Park, Wisconsin. Part IV - An American Nazi's final bark - builds another narrative around white racist, Glenn Miller, who attacked a Jewish Community Center and assassinated Jewish people there. Upon his arrest he informed police “My name is Glenn Miller. I’m an anti-Semite. I hate goddamn Jews. How many did I get.” 

  As with Part II, Parts III and IV, add related discussion of related study and writing in the causes and consequences of right-wing extremists and the need for more aggressive counter measures. Part V - A Movement Rises – narrates a history of the Black Lives Matter campaign, which began shortly after the Obama inauguration with the deliberate murder of Oscar Grant by BART transit police at Fruitvale station. A bystander recorded the Fruitvale murder with a phone camera. There would be more video recorded murders that would go online. Lowery interviewed some of the victim’s families giving an especially personal side to their horror and rage. Readers will find assassination discussion of Eric Garner, New York; Trayvon Martin, Sanford, Florida; Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri; Shawn Washington, St. Louis; George Floyd, Minneapolis; Jamar Clark, Minneapolis; Philando Castile, St. Paul, Minnesota; Heather Heyer, Charlottesville, Virginia; Breonna Taylor, Louisville, Kentucky. 

  Only a page of a twelve page epilogue has what I would expect to find in an epilogue. All but a page recounts another assassination of a young man named Richard Collins III and its depressing aftermath. The one page ending takes a couple of sentences to write the depressing reality of what so many suspect already that politicians like Trump will continue to exploit and encourage bigotry and the murderous acts of white supremacists. Lowery’s last sentence reads “And as long as there are elements within our mainstream politics and media willing to cynically play to those fears – unwilling to call racism and bigotry by their rightful names – we can expect additional bursts of white racial violence, the horrific calling card of our era of American Whitelash.” 

  Author Lowery does a good job narrating and documenting the evidence for the many episodes of white supremacist violence he recounts in the book. As a journalist he covered many of the events, which allows a first-hand account. The book has endnotes by page number but does not have an index, a decided disadvantage because it makes it difficult to follow names that appear and reappear in the narrative. The book includes authors and titles of related work at various places around the book. I counted at least twenty of them and they appear in lieu of a bibliography.  

  We learn from a white supremacist interviewed for the book they avoid formal organization as too easy to infiltrate and prosecute. Instead, they use social media to spread their violent aims and hope converts will plan their own assassinations. As Lowery explained at the beginning, he wanted to let readers understand “the relentless cycle of violence that has defined American history.” He did that well but I would expect those who finish the book will be evaluating the chances for civil war and realize Trump has spent the last eight years preaching white supremacy.

Rural White Rage - A Review

 

Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, (NY: Random House, 2024), 249 page

White Rural Rage examines the white rural population as a minority block of angry, threatening, and violent voters ready to empower Donald Trump and the Republican Party to bring down democracy in exchange for arbitrary rule. The authors explain in their prologue they write as a warning to complacent members of the majority who might be discounting the threat.

The authors develop their arguments in eight chapters where the first chapter defines four compounding causes of our dangerous politics. They list and give brief descriptions of the four causes: 1. white despair, 2. outsize political power, 3. veneration of white culture and values, 4. media triggering of whites. Then they identify a “Fourfold Threat” from viewpoints common to rural whites: 1. Racism, xenophobia, anti-urban disdain, and anti-immigrant sentiment, 2.  Acceptance of conspiracies as facts, 3. Undemocratic and anti-democratic beliefs, 4. Justification of violence.

Chapter 2 narrates the mostly economic problems generating white despair that include the loss of population, jobs, and the closing of basic services and essential health care.  In chapter 3 the authors describe how and why rural America has political power much greater than its numbers should allow. Discussion of the gerrymandered House and malapportioned Senate provide much of the answer.  

The next two chapters describe the ways and means Fox News and their political commentators work to generate resentment and hatred in the urban-rural divide, then on to Donald Trump as the unlikely leader of rural America. Chapter 6 returns to a more detailed discussions of the “Fourfold Threat” where the justification of violence holds most of the threat. Chapter 7 describes the rural population, currently at 76 percent white, but the 24 percent minority share is up in recent years, especially the Latino community. Discussion here describes the unique hardships of rural minorities as they provide cheap labor to a still depressed economy. The last chapter combines the cumulative evidence with an incredulous discussion of a divided America. Having assembled a well-documented book full of evidence of America’s social and political decline the authors might be wondering how America could fall so far.

I found a broad theme of Republican Party division mentioned at various places through the book. For example, at page 147 I found Trump “exposed a profound division between the Republican Party and the base of voters upon whom it relied, making clear that the base and the elite are different people with different priorities.” The Republican elite has worked relentlessly to convince white rural America they are an aggrieved minority justified in hating urban Democrats.

Republicans have succeeded in getting the white rural vote by wide margins while they ignore the rural population and do absolutely nothing for them. Schaller and Wardman document Republican party efforts to make rural life worse over time that include promoting private school vouchers, defunding public schools and public colleges.  They have successfully run off OB-GYN physicians as part of attacks on abortion rights and birth control. State governments create the local governments with enabling legislation, but state legislatures have the sovereign power to eliminate local government authority at any time. They can cancel elections and appoint their Republican operatives or deny local governments from providing services such as broadband service, preserving it for corporate monopolists.

The white rural population consistently votes against their own economic interest but no one should think they do not understand what they are doing. The authors apparently agree as I quote them: “With wide eyes and full hearts, rural Whites recognized Trump’s exclusionary, reality defying, undemocratic and violent tendencies- and rallied behind him because of, not despite, his repeated disregard for America’s most sacred democratic traditions.”

Remember that 18- and 19-year-old white boys of the south fought the Civil War and died by the tens of thousands to preserve slavery for rich plantation owners. In exchange the survivors got to claim to be in a class superior to the black freedmen. Before the Civil War southern white boys did not lynch blacks, they were a plantation investment. After the war Jim Crow and lynching made life quite dangerous for blacks, all to maintain class relations with the acceptance of the white elite that controlled the south. Never underestimate the power of class as a source for violence and political breakdown.

The rise of Trump has brought the country some unlikely sycophant followers. Senators Elise Stefanik and Ted Cruz, to wit, both graduates of Harvard College; maybe Harvard breeds more arrogance and egotism than knowledge and principle. Schaller and Wardman discussed politics with politicians that do not worry Trump misconduct will ever affect them. They express privilege as their just due with or without democracy. They pander to Trump violence toward objectors with no sign of reservation.

The authors of White Rural Rage did an impressive job organizing and documenting their varied assertions.  There was a variety of economic data, polling and voting data, stories of Trump followers planning violence such as the plan to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Witmer. They also consulted a variety of non-profit funded research from places like the Brookings Institution and others. I for one would not challenge any conclusions they made, but I will suggest a return to America’s recurring racism takes first place as the cause of this new round of America’s disintegrating politics. Trump merely threw out all restraint with a more aggressive brand of vulgarity and overt threat of violence than George Wallace from the 1970’s or any previous presidential candidate.

Trump has repeatedly vowed to end constitutional government which makes it impossible to believe he can take the presidential oath of office to protect and defend the constitution. He is not a legitimate candidate, but corporate America with their campaign money bags sits mum on the side lines, apparently in the belief Trump will not interfere with them or hurt their profits. The authors make an excellent case of the threat to democracy, but the threat of violence and civil warfare permeates the discussion. Readers can decide for themselves what they think are chances for widespread violence of Trump as president.