Blair Mountain and labor's living history: Ninety years on, the coal seams of West Virginia are a battlefield once more: for working people, the struggle goes on
by Clancy Sigal
The Guardian (United Kingdom)
My first time in Westminister Abbey, London, I was taken inside by a coal miner friend who was down from South Wales for a brief London holiday. Suitably awed, we gawked at Poets' Corner, the Coronation Throne, the tombs and effigies of prelates, admirals, generals and prime ministers – England in all its majesty and pageantry. Gazing at the Gothic Revival columns, transepts and amazing fan-vaulted ceiling, my friend said, "Impressive, isn't it? Of course, it's their culture not ours."
Our culture – class conscious, bolshie, renegade – rarely lay in plaques and statues, hardly ever in school texts, but mainly in orally transmitted memories passed down generation to generation, in songs and stories. "Labor history" has become a province of passionately committed specialists and working-class autodidacts, keepers of the flame of a human drama at least as fascinating and blood-stirring as the dead royal souls in the Abbey. It belongs to all of us who claim it.
I'm lucky because my family's secular religion is union. They include cousin Charlie (shipbuilders), cousin Davie (electrical workers), cousin Bernie (printers), my mother (ladies' garment) and father (butchers and barbers), and cousin Fred (San Quentin prisoners). Establishment history may have its Battle of Trafalgar and Gallipoli; we have Haymarket Square, Ludlow, Centralia and Cripple Creek: labor's battle sites, more often slaughtering defeats than victories.
Until recently, a lot of this history casually disappeared down Orwell's "memory hole", forgotten, censored or ignored. But with the spectacular emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and fight-backs in states like Wisconsin and Ohio, young people especially seem to be regaining and reinvigorating a living history. Memory stirs.
This contest for memory is a class struggle by other means.
Half our story – the half where unions created the modern middle class – is written in the pedestrian language of contracts, negotiations, wages and hours laws … the nuts and bolts of deals. After all, unions exist to make a deal.
But the other half is inscribed in the whizzing bullets, shootouts and pistol duels of out-and-out combat. Labor has its own Lexington and Gettysburg. And none more bloodily inscribed than in the hills and hollows of the West Virginia coal fields.
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From Herb Reid:
ReplyDeleteThanks, David, for the Guardian article by Clancy Sigal. Clancy is now 85 years old and, for some of us, will always be remembered as the author of Going Away (1961). He wrote this autobiographical novel when he was in his early 30s. Some of us will recall the discussion of the Communist smashing of the Hungarian workers' revolt (1956). In fact, Michael Kazin's new book American Dreamers talks about Sigal & his novel.
As a political theorist, I must also mention Hannah Arendt's emphasis on the workers councils in the Hungarian Revolution and her larger theme of "the revolutionary tradition and its lost treasure." She mentions in On Revolution that during that revolution "the Gettysburg Address was broadcast to the people."
Some of us have read Lincoln as appealing to a national citizenship projected in the 14th Amendment rightly understood (as Justices Black and Douglas argued). Sadly, the Supreme Court took a path that might be called "corporate personhood" which recently has given us Court endorsement of Mitch McConnell's "money is speech" doctrine. I urge everybody to connect with a "moving to amend" group because as Thom Hartmann keeps saying the great majority are suffering from unequal protection. Betsy and I see "corporate personhood" as a necessary target of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Economic violence has several roots but this very likely is its main constitutional one in USA. Nevertheless, this is just one step toward what John Bellamy Foster calls "a new society based on the restoration of the human metabolism with nature at a higher level of development" and beyond the "dominant accumulation system" that has brot us an unstable climate & new levels of poverty. Herb