In Memory of the Wheatland Hop Field Riot - August 3, 1913

Today marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Wheatland Hop Field Riot. 

The uprising stemmed from the brutal working conditions imposed upon itinerant farm workers harvesting hops at the Durst Ranch in Wheatland, California.  An influx of job seekers, whose numbers far exceeded the number of positions available, drove down the already slender going wage.  The workers who were taken on, many of them women and young children, performed heavy physical labor for 12 hour days in triple digit heat.  Despite the temperature, Durst did not provide water to the workers but instead sold them an acidic beverage to slake their thirst.  Shade and adequate toilet facilities were also lacking.

Facing a strike over low pay and poor treatment, Ralph Durst called in the Yuba County district attorney and sheriff’s deputies to quell the unrest.  The inevitable confrontation led to the sheriff’s contingent firing into the crowd after it resisted their attempt to arrest Industrial Workers of the World organizer Richard “Blackie” Ford, who was addressing the strikers.  At least one worker in the crowd fired back.  When the smoke cleared, four people lay dead: the DA, a sheriff’s deputy, and two workers.  Scores of other people were injured.

As so often happened during the labor struggles of the era, California Governor Hiram Johnson called in the National Guard to restore order for the bosses.  Ultimately, Ford, fellow organizer Herman Suhr, and a number of the other laborers present were apprehended and questioned.  Many of them were beaten or otherwise abused during the interrogations.  One suspect killed himself in his jail cell.

In the end, Ford, Suhr, and two others were bound over for trial on second-degree murder charges in the death of the district attorney.  Ford and Suhr were ultimately convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.   When Ford was paroled in 1924, he was promptly indicted for the death of the sheriff’s deputy only to be acquitted at trial.  Soon thereafter, Suhr was pardoned and set free.  

Let us not forget the workers killed and wounded that day, nor should we forget the IWW organizers Herman Suhr and Blackie Ford who were unjustly imprisoned for their efforts on behalf of labor rights.  An injury to one is an injury to all, then and now.

Solidarity forever.

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

Please Back Off

I’ve just finished watching Won’t Back Down, last year’s movie about parents who defy the odds to improve their kids’ education.

Won’t Back Down, financed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and businessman Philip Anschutz, promoted by Michelle Rhee, and touted by conservative school “reform” advocates, makes its point in a predictably hamfisted fashion so that even the densest teabilly Wal-Mart shopper can figure it out.  I thoroughly hated it, as I expected to.  The story was inspired by a real-life incident a couple of years ago where parents used California’s parent-trigger law to convert a failing public school into a charter institution.

The producers signed a raft of well-known names for the project.  Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the main character, Jamie, while Viola Davis plays Jamie’s ally, Nona.  Clearly the project was well-financed, considering they also brought on Ving Rhames and Holly Hunter. 

Despite the strong cast, I was underwhelmed by the acting.  There was very little chemistry among the actors, and I just wasn’t convinced by their performances.  Also, and I can’t explain why, the Gyllenhaal siblings have always rubbed me the wrong way.  And so I couldn’t help but chuckle at thought of Maggie Gyllenhaal, a paragon of liberal smugness, cynically accepting the lead role in a right-wing propaganda flick.  Really, Maggie?  Did you need the money that badly?

Back to the film: Jamie is a plucky single mom who works two jobs while raising a daughter with learning disabilities.  Frustrated by her little girl’s lack of progress in school, she joins up with burned out elementary school teacher Nona after discovering a loophole in the law which allows parents and teachers to take over a school if it is failing.

Gyllenhaal and the scriptwriters self-consciously strive to imbue Jamie with an air of blue collar authenticity.  Jamie speaks in malapropisms while letting her daughter watch TV and munch Snickers bars after school.  She’s awed by Nona’s neatly kept home.  Her sense of boundaries is poor at best as she importunes parents, teachers, and administrators alike to do what’s right for her daughter. 

Won’t Back Down is a mostly conventional buddy film / fight-the-system tale.  Predictably, it concludes with the obligatory corny feel-good scene I remember in every Eighties inspiring teacher movie from Stand and Deliver to The Dead Poets’ Society.  But that’s not its worst sin.  At least twice in the film, Jamie quotes Gandhi’s purported aphorism, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” as justification for her efforts.  It’s like when wingnuts such as Bill O’Reilly or Glenn Beck quote Martin Luther King; it just comes off as vaguely sacrilegious.

At its heart, Won’t Back Down is an odious anti-union, anti-public education screed.  Throughout the movie, Jamie and Nona are stymied at every turn by two-dimensional cardboard cutout foes in the form of a sclerotic school bureaucracy, a do-nothing board of education, and a union which protects incompetent teachers through tenure.  (A “job for life after two years,” as one character puts it, perpetuating a cherished conservative myth.)  Unionized teachers, we’re given to understand, have no incentive to educate beyond collecting their inflated taxpayer underwritten salaries.  

While Won’t Back Down is a poorly made hack piece which will be soon forgotten, I wish I could say the same for the movement that spawned it.  We are on a slippery slope toward school privatization and teacher deprofessionalization because of the moneyed conservative forces working toward this end.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one well-known culprit.  The Walton Family Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation are two others.

But the worst of the rogue’s gallery of charitable foundations, to my mind, is the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.  Mr. Broad, who made his fortune in insurance and by building innumerable subdivisions of tacky tract houses, did what any other egotistical plutocrat would do when faced with the prospect of paying taxes.  He simply donated a fair chunk of his wealth to a charitable foundation he created then devoted himself to doling it out as a means of wielding power.  Among its programs, the Broad Foundation sponsors an “academy” to train school administrators for the new reality of K-12 education, which is that public schools must produce a uniform “product” regardless of students’ widely varying individual aptitudes.  The test will tell: Poor scores equal unemployed teachers.

Eli Broad suffers from the same conceit other wealthy individuals share.  Because he was successful at business, this makes him an expert in every other field of endeavor.  This is especially true when it’s a service provided by the public sector.  As we all know, government’s sole raison d’être is to siphon off the hard earned wealth of job creating entrepreneurs.  Therefore, it can only be made efficient when business people either privatize, or at least apply private sector practices to, government work.  (Never mind the non sequitur underneath this assumption; there’s no moneymaking potential in taking the liberal arts courses where you would learn what one is.)

The Broad Foundation is gradually making inroads into higher education.  My alma mater recently opened a new field house built with money donated by the Broads.  To my deep distaste, the president of the endowment foundation of the college where I work is the CEO of a real estate development company owned by Eli Broad.  I believe these are harbingers of a larger trend.  It won’t be long before pressure is brought to bear on college presidents and boards of trustees to scale back or eliminate general education requirements and non-vocational majors in favor of the University of Phoenix model of workforce training.  It’s never a good idea to encourage the life of the mind when the kind of people you want working for you are narrowly trained technicians who don’t ask a lot of probing questions.

If there is a hell, I hope there is a special corner reserved for Eli Broad.  As it is, the evil he’s done in his lifetime will be perpetuated through his foundation.   And I am not one of those progressives who put their faith in the secular eschatology of revolution.  Sometimes the bad guys win.  The hardest part is when everyone around you is convinced they’re the good guys and are cheering them on to victory.

Just like in Won’t Back Down. 

     

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

A Working Class Hero is Something to Be

Labor Day weekend is an annual milestone which marks, if not the official seasonal end of summer, then at least its symbolic conclusion.

The holiday’s name has become something of a misnomer.  The United States is one of the few countries that does not observe its worker’s holiday on the first of May.  In fact, the first weekend in September was chosen by its founders specifically to distance labor from May Day and its association with the age-old bogey of socialism.  Over time, the Labor Day holiday has gone from recognizing the sacrifices and contributions of workers to being yet another excuse to consume.  

Perhaps it’s just as well.  The labor movement in the United States is in sorry shape.  One key reason is that American workers have made a unilateral suicide pact with the Right.  For a generation the gains made by organized labor have been steadily eroded by the relentless implementation of the Republican economic agenda and the impotence of Democrats in Congress and the state houses.  And for some perverse reason, workers, caught on the twin horns of false consciousness and false needs, have bought into the baldfaced lie of the crooks who own and run the country that this has all been done for their own good.

The demonization of union workers has gotten strident lately, particularly after Gov. Scott Walker’s assault on public employees’ collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin.  Economic policy has become all about relieving “job creators” of their grievous tax burden while slashing such benefits for the middle and working classes as funded pension plans and subsidized public higher education.  The American labor movement itself is partly to blame, resting on the laurels of decades-old achievements while failing to demonstrate its relevance to today’s workers. 

Even in the face of the conservative propaganda machine, organized labor should have been able to hold its ground better than it has.  Union membership in the U.S. has declined to a depressing 11% of all employees (and only 7% of private sector workers), from a high of 34% in 1954.  The current business opposition to federal “card check” legislation is only the latest episode in the long war on unions.

Resistance is futile, it seems—whether it’s resistance to the 1% or resistance to public apathy.  Occupy Wall Street, which appeared to have the makings of a genuine mass movement at its inception just a short year ago, has become a punch line not only for the SUV-and-tract-house set but also among the very people who should have been its natural allies.  By dismissing the OWS protestors as unkempt pot smoking freaks, mainstream society ignores the ice rapidly melting under its own feet. 

In retrospect Occupy was more street theater than political force.  Its message was that substantive change can occur only if each of us takes responsibility for safeguarding our personal and collective rights.  (That last phrase needs to be spoken more often.  It sends a chill of dread down capitalists’ spines.) 

As the national discourse turns into a right-wing monologue, controversy over trivial utterances such as the President’s recent “you didn’t build that” remark illustrates a fact frequently missed: The heroic businessman (or woman) lauded in our culture can accomplish nothing without the efforts of their employees.  Confronting declining work conditions and the growing lack of available skilled jobs, workers must struggle to preserve their human dignity and fight being considered as little more than beasts of burden.  The struggle can only be effective when conscientization is followed by organization.

Enjoy your rights while you still have them.

Happy Labor Day.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

May Day Greetings

I’d like to extend my best wishes to all on this International Workers’ Day.  May the coming year bring progress and solidarity for all workers.