No Simpler Time

Historian and playwright Jan-Ruth Mills teaches Holocaust History at Pima Community College in Tucson, AZ.  In October of this year, she served dramaturg for a reading of Sinclair Lewis’ IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE to celebrate the 75^th Anniversary of the Federal Theater Project, which was the occasion for writing the below. 

We hear a lot these days about wanting to return to the “real America”.  Is this the “real America” the speakers have in mind?  Kudos to Jan, our kid, for researching and writing this, and giving me permission to reprint it here.

No Simpler Time

Jan-Ruth Mills

Imagine a United States of America where

Children are forcibly taken from their parents to schools “as far as possible from [their] home environment” in order to strip them of their culture and make them as “American” as possible (within the limitations of their “racial” characteristics).[1]

Corporate donors establish a Eugenics Record Office (ERO) to promote the breeding of “good” American families. A majority of states practice forced sterilization. When a case challenging the sterilization of a young woman is heard by the Supreme Court, an ERO officer testifies that she, like her mother, is a promiscuous imbecile (although she earned Bs in grammar school and her pregnancy was the result of rape). Her baby is found to be defective as well. The Chief Justice writes in the majority opinion, “Three generations of imbecility is enough.” Impressed, Nazi Germany models sterilization laws after ours.[2]

Tens of thousands of African American men (370,701 in one year in one state alone) are arrested on minor charges and then “leased” to US Steel and other corporations. With no hope of appeal and no oversight of working conditions, thousands die of starvation or beatings or illness. Chained together 24/7 for years, they eat, sleep, and defecate without hope of privacy. Some are transported to worksites in open cages. A white farmer writes the US Justice Department that thousands of black families are held on farms without proper nutrition, clothing, medical assistance, or education. The Justice Department seldom investigates reports.[3]

Private militias employing more than 100,000 men,[4] with the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Justice Department, and local law enforcement suppress the labor movement, often violently. “State officials seemed genuinely confused as to the difference between public and private power, and treated corporate interests as if they were the public interest.”[5]

Would that these were fictions rather than the historical context for Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here. For millions of working class Americans, people of color and women, if we understand the “it” to be the loss of habeas corpus and the rights of privacy, assembly, speech, and press, and the threat of arrest or even murder by corporate militias deputized by the state to bust unions, “it” did not require a fascist dictatorship. It was here.

Those who sought to end the progressive labor movement’s efforts to end child labor and to establish a minimum wage and a forty-hour workweek were not limited to using the resources of capital and the state and federal government. At the 1911 annual meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) the president declared, “The American Federation of Labor is engaged in open warfare against Jesus Christ and his cause."[6]  In the interwar period, NAM promoted the “America Plan,” an insistence on open shops and a refusal to negotiate with unions, declaring them to be un-American.

Unions would be further characterized as un-Christian by evangelists like Abraham Vereide, Frank Buchanan, and Bruce Barton. Abandoning the fire-and-brimstone preaching style of Billy Sunday (whom many believed was the model for Lewis’ Elmer Gantry) for a consumer capitalist Christianity that could appeal to the “best people,”[7]  these men developed an elite fundamentalism that ministered to the likes of Henry Ford and James Farrell (Chairman, US Steel) as well as many political leaders. They preached that submission to God would provide a solution to the conflicts between business and labor. After returning from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Buchanan declared his admiration for Hitler and his belief that “in a God controlled nation, capital and labor would discuss their problems peacefully and reach God-controlled situations.”[8] Later he would explain that the best America would be a “God-controlled fascist dictatorship.”[9]

All this talk of submission might be dismissed as a simple matter of faith (or preference), except that in practice Ford and US Steel and other members of NAM viewed submission to the will of the corporations as their employee’s Christian duty, and they went to great lengths to avoid collective bargaining. Their Jesus cared more about a closed shop than about poverty and unemployment. Private militias continued to grow and acquired millions of dollars worth of machine- and handguns as well as tear gas and even chloropicrin, a lethal gas used in WWI. “While most hostile tactics of employers were legal—there was no federal legislation prohibiting espionage or violent strike breaking and private police agencies went largely unregulated by state and federal law—the activities of labour groups were frustrated by court injunctions and antitrust prosecution. It was only labour’s use of force which was illegitimate.”[10] Except for sticks and stones and their raised voices, strikers had little with which to defend themselves.

Despite these dangers, millions of Americans took to the streets to secure the rights of assembly, association, and speech. It Can’t Happen Here takes place in 1936, two years after the New Deal’s recognition of labor unions’ collective bargaining rights inspired the West Coast waterfront strike. In San Francisco, striking longshoreman faced the San Francisco police, deputized “special police” (the militia of the San Francisco Industrial Association), and finally the National Guard.[11] On Bloody Thursday, July 6, 1934, three strikers were killed. In typically anti-union rhetoric, common in the main stream newspapers of the time, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “Police revolvers cracked into mobs of howling, cursing strikers.”[12] (Howling and cursing are not, of course, illegal.) The next day, the silent funeral procession down Market Street of thousands of longshoreman and their families led to a city-wide general strike.[13] In all, there were 1,856 in 1936,[14] the same year the La Follette Senate Committee began hearings into the abuses of corporate militias to bust unions.[15]

Long before writing It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis dreamed of writing a novel about labor, but despite attendance at union meetings, interviewing Tom Mooney and Eugene Debs, and even hiring a journalist to help him gather details, the subject failed to inspire.[16] Despite his diligence, he remained unable to create working class characters that rise above caricatures of lazy hired help or curmudgeonly type setters. One reason may be found in the words of John Pollikop in the novel, who tells the middle-aged and middle-class newspaper editor Jessups,

You never thought about them, because they was just routine news, to stick in your paper. Things like the sharecroppers and the Scottsboro boys and the plots of the California wholesalers against the agricultural union and dictatorship in Cuba and the way phony deputies in Kentucky shot striking miners.[17]

If Lewis was never able to rise above the limitations of the wire service reports, his novel and play challenged artists and intellectuals to imagine living under the same conditions so many of their compatriots endured. He challenged the middle class to rise to the heroism they read about in the morning papers. The existence of a private militia attached to Windrip’s political party is presented as something foreign, something that smacks of the Nazi’s Sturbmabteilung or Mussolini’s Squadristri, but its name, the Corpos, connects them, if thinly, to the realities of the union activists who kept big corporations from making “it” happen here.

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[1] “The Problem of Indian Administration,” Alaskool Central. 2004. Web. 10/1/2011

[2] The case is Buck v. Bell, the young woman’s name was Vivienne Buck. See http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/list2.pl

[3] Alabama, 1927. Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books, 375

[4] Free, Rhona C. 21^st Century Economics. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2010

[5] Weiss, Robert P. “Private Detective Agencies and Labour Discipline in the United States, 1855-1946, The Historical Journal. Vol. 29, No. 1 (Mar. 1986, 97 Jstor. Web.  10/11/2011

[6] Auerbach, Jerold S. Labor and Liberty: The La Follete  Committee and the New Deal, New York: Bobbs-Merril, 1966, 146

[7] Sharlet, Jeff, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, New York: Harper, 2008, 125

[8] Ibid, 130

[9] Ibid.

[10] Weiss, 97

[11] Bloody Thursday, Cotton, Jared. PBS. Television.

[12] “3 Killed, Thirty One shot in widespread rioting”The Daily News. 5 July 1934. San Francisco Virtual Museum . 10/5/2011

[13] Bloody Thursday. Cotton, Jared. PBS. Television.

[14] Free, 201

[15] Weiss, 88

[16] Hersey, John. “Chronology,” Sinclair Lewis, New York: Library Classics, 1992

[17] Lewis, Sinclair. It Can’t Happen Here. New York: Signet, 1970, 249

Finally Optimism

Finally, Optimism

There is probably more to feel optimistic about the future of our country now than there has been ever since W was elected.  I really wanted him to succeed, but, alas, my desires were cruelly thwarted not only by his own ineptitude, but by the lust for power and greed of those advising him.

During these present seemingly turbulent times, however, I see the people of this country rising up, finally, and fighting back.  It disturbed me over the past few years when I would hear about the monumental apathy of the young people of this country.  I didn’t see that, but neither did I see a banner under which they could coalesce and march.

“We are the 99%” makes a marvelous banner, and it is one which does not exclude anyone who wishes to march under that banner.  Over time, I’m sure there will be more definitive objectives formulated, as well as leaders of the movement emerging.  As one pundit said this morning, “Give them a break.  They are only two months old!” 

In the meantime, the rest of us who support them but cannot for whatever reason join in must continue to raise issues that need addressing.  Last week I mentioned that JPMorgan had accrued $547B from food stamp/debit card holders.  It is easy for the banks to garner these funds by the means of “swipe” fees.  Whenever the card is swiped, a fee is automatically deducted.  To charge food stamp/debit card recipients a “swipe” fee is, in my opinion, about as crass and corrupt as one can get.  This service should be provided by the Federal government, and for a lot less money.

But, one of the good things that has happened is the formation of an organization, United Republic.  This organization came about from Dylan Ratigan’s movement, Get Money Out, and other like-minded organizations, such as the Democracy Fund.  They have united under the name United Republic: Democracy Is Not For Sale.  Their goal is to get money out of politics.  Pure and simple.  The means for doing this is not so simple.  One method is a constitutional amendment, which although it will take time, work and much politicking, would be probably the most permanent!  Google United Republic and check this out yourself.

For these, and many other reasons, I am much more optimistic about the future for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  If we can keep up the pressure, they will have a much better future than I feared they would have. 

And are these kids cute! 

Privatizing Government Services?

Of course it is not possible for any one person to say “I speak for #OWS”, nor do I presume to speak for anyone else who supports #OWS.  There are as many reasons for supporting the movement as there are people who do.

In previous blogs, however, I did emphasize that I don’t like the word “fairness” in relation to what the occupiers want.  That is a rather weak word, in my opinion, reminding me of all the times my own children would say, “That isn’t fair!”  The word “justice” is a much stronger word, and that one always reminds me of the Book of Amos in the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, “Let justice roll like a river, washing oppression away”.

People have also questioned what I mean about justice.  Precisely what is unjust that requires mending.  I have a really good example.  At the last meeting of our local Democratic club we had a representative from our local County Department of Social Services (DSS) discussing various programs that DSS administers, including the food stamp program, which for some dumb reason was renamed here in California as CalFresh.  There was a discussion about the replacement of stamps with debit cards and how convenient these were for the both the clients and the grocery stores.  The amount the client is awarded could be entered on the card which looks just likes a credit card, and thus takes away the embarrassment of having to have food stamps in the first place.  I thought this was a really great idea.  I could see how this would cut down on printing cost for the government and handling of food stamps for the grocery store.

Then, much to my consternation, I read an article on the blog, Faith In Public Life, 11/7/11, titled The Danger of Privatizing Government Support Programs.  The article quoted an article on New Deal 2.0, a project of the Roosevelt Institute which highlighted the fact that since benefits from government programs like unemployment aid and food stamps can now be administered through prepaid debit cards, rather than cash, users are running up fees for using these cards at banks like JP Morgan or Bank of America, and big banks are reaping the rewards.  As the New Deal 2.0 reporter explains:

“Big banks are making a tidy profit by acting as middlemen for what should be publicly provided services.  In just three months, from July and September, Ross reports that U.S.Bancorp, which provides unemployment benefit debit cards, made $357 million in revenue in the division that handles the cards.  That amount is more than one-fourth of its total revenue.  I previously reported that JP Morgan made $5.47 billion in net revenue for most of last year in the division that handles food stamp cards, and it was up two percent in the last three months of the year.  The head of the division himself has said, ‘Volumes have gone through the roof in the last couple of years… This business is a very important business to JPMorgan in terms of its size and scale.’

“In addition to banks profiting off of prepaid debit card fees, some of them are also getting paid directly by state governments to administer these social safety net programs.  Overall, this system results in big banks profiting from hard economic times that strain American families—as more Americans enroll in food stamp programs, banks collect more money from fees and more money from the state.”

These programs could easily be administered by both state and federal government at a much, much  lower cost.  Banks are in the business of making money regardless of the source.  Governments are in the business of providing the assistance to people in need.

Occupy Oakland Revisited.1

Several years ago our small city became the target for partiers from all over.  We contributed enough of our own locals to create a problem, but adding people coming in from all over to “Mardi Party” the weekend before Mardi Gras created a major problem.  We have a state college here, which was the locus.

My daughter, the police officer, was on duty that night, but fortunately was not at the center of the considerable riot that ensued.  A day or two later I was in my Supervisorial office waiting for my car pool ride to return from a doctor’s visit when our very competent clerk came in with a phone call.  She said, with her hand over the receiver, that she didn’t think I wanted to take the call, but I was the only Supervisor there at the moment.  She told me that the woman on the line wanted me to call our local Sheriff to “tell” him that he should let her son out of jail because all he had done was throw a brick at a police officer.  My comment to our clerk was to ask her what right her son had to throw a brick at my daughter! 

In the Occupy Oakland reporting only Keith Olbermann, that I know of, has commented that there have been some seven officers injured requiring medical treatment because of bottle, rock, paint and other objects being thrown at the police.  We forget that these police are also human beings, with all of the weaknesses as well as strengths of other human beings.  Of course, at least in our city, they have considerable ongoing training on how to restrain themselves, and how to continue in their professionalism to follow up on their motto: To Protect and to Serve. 

This is not to say there aren’t a few rogue police officers and departments, and politicians willing to exploit them for their own agendas.  Everyone knows that there are, and when they are indicted and proven guilty in a court of law, they should have the book thrown at them, regardless of what their orders from the higher ups were.  That is not the point.  The point here is do not blame all of the police for what some do. 

And in conclusion, it is of course really very bad that two Iraq war veterans were injured in the Oakland melees.  I’m not sure if these veterans wore distinctive clothing identifying them as veterans, but it really makes no difference.  It is of course really very bad that two American citizens were injured to the extent these veterans were.  We truly need to have peace here.

If we would have peace, we must work for justice.