*he forgotten anniversary*
*Matthew Engel
Tuesday September 10, 2002
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>*
America is entirely obsessed with The Anniversary this week, so it seems
right to honour the spirit of the moment. Perhaps, though, it would make
a change to look at a different anniversary, one being almost entirely
unmarked. We might also consider why so many Americans hate the British
and all other Europeans. It has, believe me, nothing to do with
September 11 or Iraq.
This autumn is the centenary of the "great strike" of 1902, the
five-month shutdown of the anthracite coalfields which threatened to
paralyse the country. Theodore Roosevelt's biographer, Edmund Morris,
described it as "the greatest labour stoppage in history". A visiting
British economist, Alexander Lowen, predicted that if the strike were
not settled, it would cause "such social consequences as the world has
never seen". There is a two-day conference being organised by some
museums in Pennsylvania next month. Apart from that, no one seems to
have noticed.
About 150,000 men, mainly Slavic immigrants on the Pennsylvania
coalfields, went on strike, demanding a nine-hour day, a 20% pay rise
and union recognition. This was a response to conditions generally
recognised even at the time as disgusting. The mines themselves were
unspeakably dangerous; the company towns were tyrannically run; child
labour was normal.
The owners' leader, George Baer, was not what you might call a
conciliatory figure: "The rights and interests of the labouring man will
be protected and cared for, not by the labour agitators," he said, "but
by the Christian men of property to whom God, in His infinite wisdom,
has given control of the property rights of this country, and upon the
successful management of which so much depends."
The strike was bitter and murderous (on both sides). In October 1902,
President Roosevelt - exasperated by the "wooden-headed" owners and
fearful of the consequences of a winter without coal - called the two
sides to the White House and eventually persuaded the owners to send the
case to an adjudicating commission. The adjudicators heard the great
attorney, Clarence Darrow, representing the miners, proclaim: "They are
fighting for slavery. We are fighting for freedom." And six months
later, they gave the union most of what they wanted, though not,
crucially, full recognition.
It was an early and significant breakthrough in the "progressive era".
It was, thereafter, no longer automatically assumed that if government
intervened at all in industrial matters, it would intervene only on the
side of capital. Four years later, Roosevelt read The Jungle, Upton
Sinclair's ferocious exposé of the Chicago meatpacking industry, and
initiated legislation against adulterated food. (Sinclair was actually
arguing for socialism, but over the years has probably produced more
converts to vegetarianism.) When the Triangle blouse factory in New York
burned down in 1913, with 146 deaths - mostly of migrant women workers
who were effectively incarcerated inside - factory legislation followed.
Still, there was no golden age for the American union movement, and
never has been. The contest between labour and capital has been nasty
and violent. Collective action is supposedly frowned upon in a country
of individualists. Perhaps more to the point, in a country formed by
migration, uppity workers are always at the mercy of the next wave of
incomers.
Still, it is assumed that, in the richest, most powerful (etc etc)
country the world has ever seen, that nothing like 1902 could ever be
repeated. Actually, people still live much like the Pennsylvania miners
all over the US, under the noses of everyone else.
Vaguely under cover, the writer Barbara Ehrenreich went out into
low-wage America a couple of years back, and did a series of menial jobs
- waitressing, scrubbing, selling - for wages above starvation levels
for anyone who didn't care what they ate or whether they had a home or
not. As a waitress in Key West, Florida, she was paid $2.15 an hour
(about £1.40). What finished her off was an especially faddy and
irritating British party of 10.
Ehrenreich's book, Nickel and Dimed, is a bestseller. It has been an
eye-opener for many Americans, but especially for outsiders. The
European view of tipping is that it is some quasi-optional extra, a
reward for pleasant service. In the US, a country with no health
service, it is (and sometimes this may well be literal) seen as a matter
of life or death.
Many Americans now habitually tip 20-25%. European visitors get hurt
when their 10-15% largesse is greeted with a filthy look. The whole
system makes us feel deeply uncomfortable. But maybe it helps to see the
modern American waitress as the spiritual heir of the Pennsylvania
coalminers.
matthew.engel@guardian.co.uk <mailto:matthew.engel@guardian.co.uk>
-- There is no hope of finding the sources of free action in the lofty realms of the mind or in the depths of the brain. The idealist approach of the phenomenologists is as hopeless as the positive approach of the naturalists. To discover the sources of free action it is necessary to go outside the limits of the organism, not into the intimate sphere of the mind, but into the objective forms of social life; it is necessary to seek the sources of human consciousness and freedom in the social history of humanity. To find the soul it is necessary to lose it. A.R. Luriavygotsky@charter.net http://webpages.charter.net/schmolze1/vygotsky/index.html http://marxists.org/subject/psychology/index.htm
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