In the last half of the seventeen hundreds a large number of white landholding men in America were feeling that their natural rights were being trampled. They decided that they must unite or die under the tyranny of King George. E Pluribus Unum: Out of the many weak colonies they represented they united to create one federation.
They were smart men, educated men, men, men who in their best moments were high-minded and principled. They spoke nobly of the rights of man, of equality, of liberty. But, like you and me, they were creatures of their time. Like you and me they were susceptible to greed, selfishness, prejudice, and short-sightedness. If they considered blacks or native Americans or even immigrants from other societies or the poor in general, or even their own mothers and daughters at all, it was mostly with the condescension of real men toward something less.
As the decades passed those noble writings filtered down to those "lessers" and they began to claim those natural rights to themselves. And as the agrarian society gave way to the industrial revolution the greed and unfairness of unrestrained capitalism became more and more obvious and its victims became more and more restive. They wanted their natural rights too. And they realized that they must unite or die, that they could be strong only if they could unite the many. The great American labor movement was born and the "all men" in the Declaration and the "general welfare" in the first sentence of the Constitution came, more and more, to refer to more than just white landholding men.
Today we celebrate that great perfecting of America. Even in 2021 we are not finished. Lord knows we have taken some backwards steps in the last 30 years and especially in the last five, but we keep re-bending the arc of history toward justice and liberty.
I love America not because it's perfect; it's not. I love America because it is founded on the goal of ever-perfecting the balance of liberty and the common welfare.
----
Here's a Labor Day post from 2007:
It seems to me there is less respect today than at anytime in my life for the labor of common folk. The air of entitlement among some folk only a generation or two removed from "linthead" and "clodbuster" ancestors is downright shocking. People who would still be tied to farm or mill had there been no union movement or New Deal or GI Bill are adamantly anti-union, anti-Democratic, anti-government programs period. There is very little awareness or appreciation for the incredible number of hands responsible for each little luxury and convenience we partially consume and largely consign to metastasizing landfills. There is great disdain for those whose labor is necessary to our wasteful lifestyles. And how dare our tax dollars be used to provide health insurance to common laborers who contribute less than us to the tax coffers.
On Labor Day this year I had the rare privilege of listening as several of my older relatives discussed the work their parents did in the cotton mills of Georgia and South Carolina. I am very proud of those folks. They sacrificed much to give their children better lives.
One interesting story was about how, when the small Methodist Church (the graveyard of which holds my grandparents) in Porterdale was used for a union organizing meeting it was burned down.
On the 1900 census of Spaulding County Georgia you will find my 10 year old Uncle Ervin listed as "elevator boy" and my fifteen year old grandmother as "mill worker". Think about that my young friends as you clip on your iPods and head to the gym to workout in your 75 dollar Nikes.
I interviewed Uncle Ervin when he was in his nineties back about 1981. He mentioned visiting Ashland, Alabama (from Griffin, Georgia) in his youth. I asked him how he got there. I thought perhaps he took a horse or wagon or maybe a train. No. "I got there the same way I got anywhere else," he said, "I walked."
I'm sure it was good exercise. I do not think he wore Nikes.
So here's my response to Tricia's Monday Poetry Stretch, an acrostic for Labor Day.
Little Uncle Irvin, ten-years-old,
A new employee, runs the mill's
Big elevator, up and down, hour after hour --
Our grandmother, fifteen and fatherless, an old hand upstairs --
Raising the bosses and the bossed,
Day after 1900 day,
And Will, and Fanny, and Molly, and Cora,
Year after non-union year.by Terrell Shaw
No comments:
Post a Comment