My father was an organizer for the Timber Workers’ Union in 1937, assigned to the richly forested Upper Midwest.
Getting lumberjacks to become unionists didn’t take much persuasion.
Their camp barracks were deplorable, having only dirt floors that became brown ice in winter and mud holes in the spring. Thin blankets on hard bunks were infested with lice. Rats ran freely. Meals consisted of little more than bread and potatoes.
The men worked exhaustive hours for lousy pay and not even a ghost of a benefit.
For trying to end that Jesus-offending status, the company marked Dad for murder.
Hired thugs had cased his movements, made note of the car he drove, and were waiting in ditches with deer rifles along a northern Michigan highway.
Father survived his otherwise certain assassination only because it was a very hot day and he luckily stopped for a beer at a tavern along his route.
The proprietor was a union supporter, and he’d overheard talk of the impending killing from patrons who were privy to the plot.
Armed with life-saving information that arrived in time only by the most fortuitous circumstance, Dad took a different road and went on to enlist more jacks to union ranks.
Since this happened a decade before I was born, I’m forcefully struck by the realization that I wouldn’t be here today if my father had just kept driving.
I’d have never been conceived or drawn the bracing breath of life, which makes me sadly recall the many murders ordered by ruthless robber barons in the early days of union organizing.
I think of all the working folk beaten or shot to death for simply wanting the promised American Dream, not a permanent nightmare of super-exploitative abuse and poverty.
Our country has a shameful record of individual organizers and rank-and-file unionists being killed by company goons.
Moreover, names like Haymarket, Ludlow, Everett, Homestead, and Lattimer refer to massacres of whole groups of unionists by hired thugs, or police and militias, during the formative years of American workers’ rights.
Deprived of accurate US labor history in our schools, much of today’s working class has scant appreciation that unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, the eight-hour-day, and weekends off didn’t miraculously fall from the sky.
They came only because unionists from decades past fought long and hard—often losing their lives—to raise essential standards for this country’s wage-earning majority (even for workers not belonging to unions, since the successes of organized labor achieve prevailing conditions that lift all boats to a higher place).
Especially after the beautifully inspiring labor upsurge in Wisconsin provoked by an arrogant, bought-and-paid-for governor/dictator, I think of the myriad dead who fell in labor’s noble cause.
I wonder what might have been accomplished by the children they never had a chance to have. What possible advances benefiting this nation and the entire human race?
And what about the orphans and widows left behind, or the bereaved husbands who survived the violent loss of their wives to repression?
It was common decency and solidarity that made a Michigan bartender save my father long before I was born.
And it was precisely the same sentiments—together with an irresistible yearning for justice—that made Dad do what he was doing when he nearly perished so many years ago.
Good men and women can be killed by evil, abysmally selfish interests.
But ideas whose time has come can never be extinguished.
Those who grew “fabulously” rich by underpaying workaday toilers—and who enjoy tax evasion loopholes rivaling the rings of Saturn—are in no tenable position to crush the demand for justice that their terrible behavior engenders.
Nor can they thwart the angry insistence that billionaires shouldn’t ostentatiously luxuriate when God alone knows how many destitute souls will sleep in corrugated appliance cartons on this coming cold night.
Particularly because it was the moneyed elite’s avarice that made so many lose their jobs and homes in the first place.
Dad died in 2002, after having joined numerous other worthy battles since his experience as a Timber Worker organizer.
I wish he’d lived to see the mammoth crowds that recently gathered in Madison in determined furtherance of labors’ great purpose.
He’d have surely rejoiced, thrust a clenched fist into the air, and stepped forward to help carry it on!
Dennis Rahkonen of Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the ’60s.
As Mr. Rahkonen rightly observes, the eight hour day, the minimum wage, pensions, vacations and such did not miraculously fall from the sky, they were achieved by a long and hard struggle. Although the unions are generally given credit for that struggle, I believe the contribution of the Commnist Party USA have gone down the memory hole. Since the time of John Reed, CPUSA members were commonly the most militant and dedicated members of their unions, the spearhead of the struggle. They suffered government suppression because they were the heart and soul of unionism. Apart from the labor struggle, they led the fight against Jim Crow and for feminism. The abandoning of CPUSA to government suppression by the “liberal left” in the forties and fifties was pure cowardice and has been an albatross that it has worn around its neck since then. Progressive politics in the USA has been demonstrably emasculated in the absence of a genuine left.