If I had to pick the most jarring experience of my life apart from any personal loss or tragedies befalling family or friends, it was what I learned of my hometown only after I left it.
Born and raised in Lawrence, Mass., the grandson of immigrants and son of a factory worker, I never knew that Lawrence was the scene of one of the six most consequential labor strikes in American history until I was a freshman at Salem State College 25 miles away.
By itself, that may have done little more than momentarily raise an eyebrow, but an assignment from my history class offered a detail that stung. The mill owners organized well-off residents from all over the city and nearby towns to discredit the strikers, attacking them as “Godless” and “Communists,” for a parade down Essex Street under banners that read:
For God and Country!
And so I learned just what the city celebration seven years earlier in 1962 was all about when my 7th grade, Catholic school class marched in the formation of rosary beads in a parade that filled both Broadway and Essex with classes of every school in the city in some religious or patriotic display among the fire trucks, police cruisers, and vehicles with the names of Lawrence businesses–not to mention the young US Attorney General and his even younger brother who was running for the Massachusetts senate seat vacated by an older brother now in the White House.
That 50th anniversary commemoration was also called “For God and Country.” There were no protests that I recall, not a whisper. The city was unanimous in its approval. My classmates and I–carrying props that designated us as “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers”–had a great time marching, shaking hands with Jack’s brothers, Bobby and Ted, and waving at parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles in the windows above the downtown stores.
We had no idea that we were celebrating a repudiation of the generations that came before. If our parents did, they didn’t let on–and their parents held their tongues.
In retrospect, I may have done the same as an adult in the heat of the Cold War midway between Sputnik and the Cuba Missile Crisis. Our parents were America’s brand new middle-class living in new homes with luxuries unheard of before WWII–fancy ovens and toasters, improved refrigerators, washing machines, driers, cars with tires that didn’t go flat every couple hundred miles, automatic transmissions, and televisions newly available in color. Why risk any of that in a country still in the grip of the Red Scare no matter how dead and discredited Joe McCarthy already was?
At the time, however, the feeling of betrayal at that moment in Salem State’s library gave me a taste for American history, particularly that of the Labor Movement, which isn’t just slighted in history texts but in some states banned.
Business dictates that textbook publishers satisfy the largest possible markets, and school boards that approve texts in the South tend to be unified. In Texas, it is statewide, making it the publishers’ biggest prize by far. To win it, they must observe a ban on any content critical of America’s “free market” system. In effect, this has been–and still is–a gag order against labor movement history. Publishers, avoiding added costs of different editions for different states, then market the Texas-approved book nationwide.
So it is that a boy growing up in Lawrence has no more exposure to labor history than a boy in Laredo has to the facts that led to America’s invasion of Mexico and annexation of Texas. So it is that a girl growing up in Vermont learns no more about slavery than a girl–black or white–growing up in Virginia learns of the habitual beatings of enslaved people by overseers hired for that precise purpose, much less the frequent rape of enslaved women by their owners.
Instead, history texts sweep these details under the rugs of “States Rights” and “Property Rights” that appear on the pages as flags of a “valorous” cause. The texts tell us that the war with Mexico had nothing to do with expanding slavery, that Texas was part of the Louisiana Purchase–Pres. Polk and others called not for “annexation,” but “re-annexation”–and Mexico attacked us. Slavery, barely mentioned in these texts, was a “benevolent institution,” and most all slaves were well-treated. This white-wash–in both senses of the word–is even more complete regarding labor history. Some of those texts do not mention FDR’s New Deal. For the sake of God and Country, it never happened.
Today, education is among the fronts of America’s “Culture Wars.” During last year’s campaign, the incumbent president was among many Republicans who pushed for “patriotic education,” most notably at a mid-pandemic, no-mask, and crowded rally at Mount Rushmore. When he vowed to stop public schools from teaching our children to “hate America,” Republicans roared in approval. After his defeat and to this day, Republican governors and legislatures are moving to ban “critical race theory” from all public schools, from elementary to university levels.
As an outgrowth of the “1619 Project,” a full-scale, carefully researched report by historians commissioned by the New York Times, critical race theory links racial discrimination to the nation’s foundations and legal system. To refute it, Republicans issued their own “1776 Project,” a 41-page white-wash thrown together by their own political operatives. As Heather Cox Richardson described it, “aside from the bad history, the report is a fascinating window into the mindset of [the Trump] administration and its supporters. In it, the United States of America has been pretty gosh darned wonderful since the beginning, and has remained curiously static.”
Nationally, we have enough reasonable people in high places to stop extreme schemes such as “1776” in their tracks. The Biden Administration ditched “1776” while poet Amanda Gorman’s survey of American promise was still ringing in our inaugural ears.
On the state level, however, we still have numerous Republican officials who, under the thrall of Donald Trump, regard history with the same contempt and derision they regard science. And some of our own best intentions lead us to cut rather than add to history as taught in our schools. The most incisive and irrefutable statements on race are annually banned from school curricula because they “make students uncomfortable.”
Just why does anyone think Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird? As a recent meme on social media put it, if black children have to experience racism, white children can learn about it.
So, too, the Labor Movement with hundreds of strikes all across the 48 states spanning over 50 years that gave us the 40-hour work week, the weekend, occupational health and safety protections, child labor laws, and numerous other benefits. Strikes–most notably Pullman Railroad in Chicago 1894, Lawrence Textiles 1912, Paterson (N.J.) Silk 1913, Ludlow (Colo.) Coal & Iron 1914, Matewan (W.V.) Coal Mine 1920, Flint (Mich.) General Motors 1937–didn’t just win higher wages and tolerable conditions for those who worked there at the the time. The Bread and Roses Movement born in Lawrence in 1912 paved the way for women’s suffrage in 1920. Taken together, they created America’s middle class.
Then came 1981 and a Republican administration bent on deregulation. Indeed, the most consequential strike since WWII was that of America’s Air Traffic Controllers, all of them fired, the first move in the systematic dismantling of America’s manufacturing base and, with it, the middle class. Factories went overseas, many jobs were “outsourced,” a new common word in our everyday vocabulary along with “streamlining” and, eventually “gig economy.”
All of it made possible by the erasure of labor history from America’s memory and consciousness. All of it wrapped in the American flag and accompanied by the National Anthem with occasional references to the Holy Bible, upside down or not, open or shut, read or assumed. All of it in the names of God and Country.
Nothing at all jarring about it until you find yourself on the outside looking in.
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Bread and Roses: Dignity and Respect in Working Class Struggles
https://dp.la/exhibitions/breadandroses/end/god-and-country
Though I never mentioned it, a brand new book, Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class, prompted this blog. I decided to give it a separate review, to be posted soon:
Mouth of the River 
Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States was so jarring that I could only read it in bits. Having grown up in the 50’s with post-depression and WWII parents, the white washed version was the only one in school and at home. Meeting with SDS folks in the 60’s opened my eyes to the reality of American history and Howard’s book seared it into my mind.
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If you were to teach a college class called The American Labor Movement, Zinn’s book would be the text, a complete survey of strikes large and small everywhere in the country. Much of it is surprising and would be hard to believe if not for the documentation, especially items such as the city of St. Louis being turned into a commune a la Paris for a few months, and to a lesser extent Chicago. Since the industrialists owned governors and state legislatures, West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania were turned into armed camps. This is why the right often mentions Zinn by name to villify him as an anti-American whose work must be kept out of schools. But People’s History is a survey. To fill out those stories and numerous specific books–as well as films such as John Sayle’s Matewan a true story set in a WV coalfield, as well as representative of union organizing and owners’ attempts to frame strikers with acts of violence in most all strikes.
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