Labor Day reflections
Labor Day. Once upon a time, during presidential election years, this was the day on which the political knives came out.
It was the day on which the candidate from the Missouri heartland, or the farm in Illinois, or the comfortable mansion on Cape Cod, or the Texas ranch, would fly to Michigan to put in an appearance before tens of thousands gathered in downtown Detroit — there to kick off the run-up to the election in November in front of unionized autoworkers and their families.
Labor Day, more than any other of our national holidays, is political, sometimes intensely so. For instance: Labor Day 1933 in Uniontown featured the governor of Pennsylvania. One aspect of the community’s Labor Day Parade was a proliferation of pictures of President Franklin Roosevelt “around which wreaths of flowers had been draped.” (So said a local newspaper.)
“Lincoln fired the slaves,” read one of the many signs carried by marchers, mostly striking coal miners, “Roosevelt freed us all.”
A group of striking Uniontown shirt factory workers held aloft a sign which read, “United we stand, divided we starve.”
For the governor’s appearance, the crowd at the Uniontown High School football field numbered an astounding 20,000.
Gifford Pinchot, a Republican and a Progressive, was in Uniontown to give his support to miners in the middle of a bloody dispute with mine owners over union representation.
Along with an admonition to keep the peace, Gov. Pinchot told the crowd what it wanted to hear: those who were stirring up trouble were those in charge of the mines.
“The fight is against the grasping money lords,” the governor declared. “Your fight is against the Mellons, Morgans … and the rest of the money barons who have run the United States ….”
Now the money changers were on the run. “These past few weeks have been to the miners what the Civil War was to the slaves …. Now we are seeing, all of us, the dawning of a new day.”
Gov. Pinchot’s Labor Day rally speech was as political as they come; by comparison, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren look almost timid.
It’s instructive that Pinchot compared the plight of largely white miners to black slaves in “the Old South.” It points up the fact that the interests of white wage-earning Americans and black Americans have not always been as divergent as the current racial climate suggests.
During the halcyon days of the Civil Rights movement this was the case. At least that’s the way some union leaders saw things. The March on Washington in August 1963 is remembered as the occasion for Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, which was aimed squarely at the problem of legal segregation in the South.
What’s overlooked is the fact that the March on Washington was billed as a march for “jobs” as well, North as well as South.
Walter Reuther of the United Autoworkers summed it up this way: “The job question is crucial because we will not solve the educational problem or housing … as long as millions” of black Americans “are treated as second class economic citizens and denied jobs.”
The chief March organizer was civil rights veteran A. Philip Randolph, president of the railroad porters union and vice president of the AFL-CIO.
The Pinchot speech also suggests the absence in today’s atomized social climate of a “one for all, all for one” attitude.
The 1933 strike for union representation mobilized thousands of western Pennsylvania miners. It’s impossible to imagine something similar happening today.
What’s been lost, according to Win McCormick, writing in The New Republic, is “the idea of citizenship”, of which “the central concepts” are “the public interest” and “the common good.”
As Robert Patton points out in his book “Bowling Alone,” unions “are an important locus of social solidarity, a mechanism for mutual assistance and shared experience.”
Their “withering” has left not only workers poorer,” Patton writes, but adrift in a sea of troubles beyond the reach of any one individual to address, let alone solve.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.