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 75th 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.
[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. 21st 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
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