Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers
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Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers
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Overview
"The strength of this book . . . encompasses a broad view of history from the bottom up and deals not only with biographical background of the nonelite in labor but with insights into black, immigrant, and grassroots working-class history as well."--Choice
Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691614809 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #51 |
| Pages: | 308 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Staughton Lynd was born in 1929 and grew up in New York City. His parents, Robert and Helen Lynd, co-authored the well-known Middletown books. Staughton went through the schools of the Ethical Culture Society. Above the auditorium of the main school were written the words: “The place where men meet to seek the highest is holy ground.”
Staughton Lynd received a BA from Harvard, an MA and PhD from Columbia, and a JD from the University of Chicago. He taught American history at Spelman College in Atlanta, where one of his students was the future Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker, and at Yale University.
Staughton served as director of Freedom Schools in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964. In April 1965, he chaired the first march against the Vietnam War in Washington DC. In August 1965, he was arrested together with Bob Moses and David Dellinger at the Assembly of Unrepresented People in Washington DC, where demonstrators sought to declare peace with the people of Vietnam on the steps of the Capitol. In December 1965, Staughton along with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker made a controversial trip to Hanoi, hoping to clarify the peace terms of the Vietnamese government and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.
Because of his advocacy and practice of civil disobedience, Lynd was unable to continue as a full-time history teacher. The history departments at five Chicago-area universities offered him positions, only to have the offers negatived by university or state administrators. In 1976, Staughton became a lawyer and until his retirement at the end of 1996 worked for Legal Services in Youngstown, Ohio. He specialized in employment law. When the steel mills in Youngstown were closed in 1977-1980 he served as lead counsel to the Ecumenical Coalition of the Mahoning Valley, which sought to reopen the mills under worker-community ownership, and brought the action Local 1330 v. U.S. Steel. After retiring, Staughton was for a time Local Education Coordinator for Teamsters Local 377 in Youngstown.
Staughton Lynd and Alice Lee Niles met at Harvard Summer School. Alice’s parents had recently become members of the Society of Friends, and Staughton had become aware of Quakerism through a cousin who served as an ambulance driver during World War II. Staughton and Alice were married at the Stony Run Meeting House in Baltimore in 1951. They have three children and seven grandchildren. In the early 1960s the Lynds became convinced Friends, and joined the Atlanta Friends Meeting. They are presently sojourning members of the 57th Street Meeting in Chicago.
Alice was a member of a union of clerical workers in the 1950s, and a member of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' Union in the 1970s. As a labor lawyer she helped visiting nurses to organize an independent union; assisted laid-off workers when they lost pension, health care and other benefits; filed occupational health and safety claims; and litigated employment discrimination cases.
The Lynds have been deeply involved in opposing the death penalty, and in probing the cases of men sentenced to death or very long sentences for their alleged roles in a major prison riot in 1993. They were co-counsel in a major class action challenging conditions at Ohio's supermaximum security prison that went up to the United States Supreme Court, Wilkinson vs. Austin. This case, now being applied in other states, established procedural standards for placement and retention of prisoners in supermax prisons.
Staughton Lynd has written or edited numerous books, including:
Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution (1967) and Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (1968), re-issued by Cambridge UniversityPress in 2009;
with Michael Ferber, The Resistance (Beacon Press, 1971);
Solidarity Unionism: Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below (Charles H. Kerr, 1992);
“We Are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s (University of Illinois Press, 1996);
Living Inside Our Hope: A Steadfast Radical’s Thoughts on Rebuilding the Movement (Cornell UniversityPress, 1997). Chapter Four of Living Inside Our Hope is an essay co-authored by Alice and Staughton called “Liberation Theology for Quakers,” which first appeared as a Pendle Hill pamphlet;
Lucasville: The Untold Story Of A Prison Uprising (Temple UniversityPress, 2004);
with Andrej Grubacic, Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History (PM Press, 2008);
with Daniel Gross, Labor Law for the Rank & Filer: Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law (PM Press, 2008);
and From Here to There: The Lynd Reader (PM Press, 2010).
Staughton and Alice Lynd have co-edited four books: Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (Olive Branch Press, 1994); Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History (Orbis Books, 1995); Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers (Monthly Review Press, 1988); and The New Rank and File (Cornell UniversityPress, 2000), which includes oral histories of labor activists in the past quarter century.
Most recently, the Lynds have written Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together, published in hardcover and paperback by Lexington Books in 2009.
Read an Excerpt
Rank and File
Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers
By Alice Lynd, Staughton Lynd
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1981 Alice and Staughton LyndAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09393-2
CHAPTER 1
CHRISTINE ELLIS
Christine Ellis recalls in detail the experience of immigrants coming to America and the support the foreign born gave each other in political as well as economic and cultural ways.
She joined the Communist Party, served as an organizer of the unemployed in the early 1930s, and was active in the Party for many years. Later she became disillusioned with the Communist Party as a possible instrument for creating a more just society.
After the period described in this account, Christine Ellis lived in Gary, Indiana and married a steelworker. She opposed the Korean War for reasons similar to those of the Vietnam War protesters. This led to efforts of the Justice Department to have her deported under the McCarran Act. She was jailed without bail for ten months in 1952–53.
While in jail she began to write the story of her life on the backs of Christmas and Easter cards sent her by supporters. After we met her she added to these recollections, writing about some incidents and telling others to us personally or to the Labor History Workshop in Gary during the summer of 1971. What appears here are several highly condensed fragments from a mass of vividly-remembered material.
CHRISTINE ELLIS
People Who Cannot Be Bought
I
ALTHOUGH I WAS ONLY FIVE when we left what is now Jugoslavia, I remember the compound where we lived and the tiny village where many of the poor peasants lived in thatch-covered huts.
Both my mother and father came from ancient communal families. We lived in huge compounds, two stories high, built of thick stone walls. There was a common kitchen and dining room where all the members of the family ate together.
In order for a commune to exist in the twentieth century, it had to have good management. At one time our family had owned a lot of land, with vineyards, many sheep, olive trees, etc. With the death of my great-grandfather our fortunes began to suffer.
My father was a good-hearted soul but he wasn't exactly a hard worker. He served his time in the army of Emperor Franz Joseph where he learned to be an excellent marksman. His marriage to my mother was pre-arranged. They hadn't even met.
My mother came from the village of Nadim, walking distance from our village of Tinj. Her mother was the head of the family in their compound. She was a widow most of her life. But she was a good manager and was the undisputed head of the household.
My mother bore twelve children but only six survived. The first four, all male, either died at birth or in early infancy. Then she had three girls.
The land-holdings of the family had dwindled to a very low point and we lived in poverty. My father, perhaps in disgust that he had lost four sons and now had three daughters, decided to go to America. He left in 1911.
His first job was digging with pick and shovel the foundation for the St. Louis, Missouri, City Hall. When that was done he joined some other Croatian immigrants in building railroad tracks in Minnesota. The extreme cold weather there did not appeal to them. Some of the men said there were coal mining towns in southern Iowa where a large number of Croatians lived, and that is how Papa came to Jerome, Iowa. Between these various jobs he managed to save up enough money to send us the fare to come to the United States via steerage on a German steamship plus train fare from New York City to Jerome, Iowa.
I can never forget the misery and suffering we endured on the ship. We traveled steerage which means down in the hold where there are no portholes for air. The place was jammed tight with double and triple bunk beds, very thin mattresses so that if a child slept in the bunk bed above you there was every chance of the urine dropping down on you. Passengers who were seasick simply vomited all over the place and the stench is impossible to describe. Early every morning everyone in the hold had to go out on deck. If a passenger was too ill to walk up, stewards came and dragged the person up the steps and threw them on the deck floor. Then buckets of sulphur were burned in the hold so that the fumes of the burning sulphur would kill the stench. The passengers had to stay out on the deck all day, regardless of the weather or their physical condition. If a passenger was seasick and lay vomiting where he or she was the stewards would come along and spill a pail of water over their heads. Sometimes they added a kick in the ribs as well.
I was the least seasick of our family. Mama suffered the most. She spent almost every day just lying on the deck floor, too ill to move or do anything. There were sinks on deck where you could wash your face or your clothes. I felt quite well and decided to wash my stockings. I foolishly hung them to dry on the ship's railing. Naturally they were gone when I went to look for them. The sad part of it is that I had only that one pair of stockings and had to do without stockings the rest of the trip.
We arrived in New York in late September so it was already getting chilly. Some enterprising immigrant showed my mother how to take any kind of paper but especially newspapers, wrap my feet in one section and then wrap another section around my legs and tie it so it stayed up. I imagine Mama must have had some string or she tore something into strips so that she could tie the newspaper securely to keep my legs warm — so I arrived in America without even a pair of stockings and my feet and legs wrapped in newspaper.
The story of our wait for three days on Ellis Island and what we had to go through because I was lame is a story in itself. Since we spoke no English we all had identification tags, our names and our destination, etc. — my mother, two sisters and myself. Mama was terribly frightened of America. She had been told in the old country that in America men rape women on the streets, openly. There was another strange thing we noticed — so many men without mustaches. Where we came from all men had mustaches, only the priest was clean-shaven. Mama was puzzled — so many priests and yet so many sinful men.
We were herded like cattle — first we were stripped naked (males in one room, females in another room) and then we were forced to walk through a huge pool of water that had Lysol in it. That was our bath. Then we went to a de-lousing room where they sprayed something on our hair to kill the headlice. After that, still naked, we each had to have a complete physical examination.
I had a congenital hip dislocation and had a limp. The doctor said I could not be admitted to the United States, that only completely healthy people could be admitted and that I would be returned to my grandmother in Europe by the first boat. Mama, though a timid and very frightened woman, totally illiterate, told the doctor very firmly that unless I was admitted she and my two sisters would also return to Europe — she would not tolerate the breaking up of the family. There was a long and very heated argument but Mama stood firm. The doctors had me walk back and forth, asked many questions. I was confused and frightened. The idea of being separated from Mama was beyond comprehension even though I loved my grandmother very much. Finally the doctors gave in and said I could stay.
The authorities [at Ellis Island] kept us in huge waiting rooms on wooden benches. There was a huge dining room where we ate at long tables. The food was so dreadful that even we who had known real hunger in Jugoslavia could hardly eat any of it. The rule was that the new immigrants had to wait till their name was called to board trains for their destination. When the immigrants arrived a telegram was sent to the person sponsoring the immigrants. Then when a return telegram of verification was received the immigrants' names would be called and they would be directed to the boat that took them to shore and to the proper railroad station. Usually it was only a matter of a few hours or a day at the most.
We sat on the benches on Ellis Island for three days. Mama was sure that either something had happened to Papa or he had changed his mind and we were stranded on Ellis Island. She wept a great deal in her helplessness. Mama was hard of hearing and that made matters even worse. An employee on the Island would go through the waiting rooms calling out the names of those whose telegrams of verification had arrived. Our name was simple enough, Stanich, but how the employee pronounced it I do not know. Fortunately for us a woman who sat near us, a Slavic woman, perhaps Polish, asked us our name and when we told her she informed us that our name was being called for the last two days. She helped us locate an Island employee and that sped up our departure from Ellis Island.
I remember very little about the long train ride from New York City to Jerome, Iowa. We had huge tickets pinned on like labels on packages and were herded on and off trains since there was no direct route from New York City to Jerome. I do remember that the seats in the trains were made of braided cane and were hard. There was no such thing as a reclining seat so we had to sit up straight on the hard seats all the way.
The "home" that awaited our arrival in Jerome was a miserable three-room frame company house, built on a dirt street along the railroad tracks and across the road from the coal mine. The year was 1913.
We lived in the company shack for several months. Across the road from us and right next to the coal mine were a number of black families. My sisters and I made friends with black children and spent most of our play time with them. I remember the delicious cookies one of the black mothers gave us. It wasn't too long before my parents were told by other Croatians that they must not allow us to play with black children. It was forbidden and we would get in trouble. So that was the end of our friendship and delicious cookies.
We moved from the company shack to other houses where we stayed only a short time. Later we moved to a long-neglected farm in Rathbun.
Rathbun was and still is basically a Croatian town. (Rathbun is the oldest Croatian settlement in Iowa and very proud of its history and tradition. Now almost a ghost town, its old-time residents hang on — their children, scattered everywhere, return for celebrations and religious festivals.) The majority of its residents were Croatian, with a few Italian families, one Czech family, and a small number of native American families.
Whereas in most places it is the foreign born who have an inferiority complex because of language problems, etc., with us in Iowa it was just the opposite.
The early settlers were of English descent. They lived off the land and income from services to those moving west. In contrast to the new immigrants, the Anglo-Saxons had a past in America, a past that had been exciting and ever-changing. Now things had settled down. Railroads criss-crossed the land, people settled in towns, industries flourished.
With the digging of coal mines, immigrants from Central Europe began to arrive. These new immigrants were peasants, long experienced in getting food from the soil. They were also ready and eager to enter industry. The new arrivals felt insecure in a foreign land. The need to have a piece of land on which to raise food, a house you could call your own for shelter in your old age was a driving force which enabled them to withstand all kinds of difficulties, to live frugally, to save for the lean years. They had no past in America, only the future and the future was unsure and unpredictable.
Perhaps in their longing for the old days the old settlers blamed the new immigrants for the change that was taking place. At any rate the old native American families around Rathbun never acclimated themselves to coal mining which became the chief source of earning a living in the hilly country thereabouts. Their farm holdings became smaller and smaller as they sold sections of land to the new immigrants who combined farming and coal mining.
Foreign-born people used to make disparaging remarks about the native American women sitting in the shade in the summer heat fanning themselves while the foreign-born women sweated in their kitchens putting up hundreds of jars of beans, tomatoes, preserves, jellies, pickles, beets, fruits of all kinds. Instead of putting up vegetables, meat, etc. for the winter, native Americans bought canned goods from the store. None of the foreign-born women would be caught dead with store bread on the table. Every bit of land was carefully cultivated and cared for.
When work was slack many of the native American families had to apply for county "charity" which was something none of the foreign-born families would even contemplate. In the old country there was no such thing as public relief. They didn't expect it or look for it in America. The foreign born all belonged to fraternal societies which provided sick benefits and insurance. In case of accident, sickness or death the foreign-born miners made provisions for the care of their dependents.
Native Americans had no fraternal organizations nor did they make provisions for their families in case of long illness or death. When misfortune came their way they had to get help from the county. The foreign born resented this. They felt that they were paying taxes to maintain people who were too lazy and thoughtless to care what happened to their women and children.
Religious prejudices entered into the picture also. All of the foreign born were Roman Catholics and they maintained a church. The native Americans were Protestants. They didn't have a church. They held their occasional religious services in one of the school rooms.
It was a matter of record that the foreign born were the most loyal and devoted union members. Some of the native Americans had to be forced to join the miners' union [United Mine Workers].
In other words, the foreign-born people had nothing but contempt for the native Americans. In our eyes they were worthless and shiftless. No self-respecting son or daughter of a foreign-born family would think of marrying into native American families.
Disturbing events deepened the prejudices and antagonisms and finally resulted in bitter hatred and distrust in the 1920s.
During World War I a large number of southern white families migrated to the mining and industrial areas in Iowa. During the war the mines worked every day. When the war was over, work in the mines slackened. The mines worked during the winter months but only a day or two a week during the summer.
The coal operators were quick to react. Wages were cut. Union miners protested and went on strike [November 1, 1920].
I've already described how the native Americans lived. When hard times came they were totally unprepared. Native Americans were willing to work for any wages. Some of the smaller pits in predominantly native American towns remained open. Native Americans became scabs.
The two mines in the town where I lived remained closed. No one dared scab. The town where I lived was made up of perhaps 95% immigrants who were staunch union men.
Coal operators and politicians fanned the prejudices that had so far remained only near the surface into open warfare. Epithets like "hunkies," "flat-heads" were hurled at the foreign born. The foreign born retorted with "johnny-bulls." Not even the children escaped from the brewing storm. The school yard in Rathbun became divided between "flat-heads" and "johnny-bulls" and heaven help the "flat-head" that tried to be neutral.
The Ku Klux Klan took the offensive. The combination of resentment of the new by the old settlers and the influx of native stock southerners who found kindred souls in the old native settlers during World War I was what gave the KKK its mass base for a number of years.
Night riders in white robes and hoods invaded Rathbun night after night, shooting pistols and shotguns into the air. The fiery cross appeared often in front of the Catholic Church and on the tip of the slag pile of the slope mine. Dynamite was exploded night after night. Crops were destroyed, barns and haystacks were burned down. Livestock was slaughtered. The Klan had a newspaper, "The Iowa Fiery Cross," which was sold publicly on the streets of Centerville (the county seat) by small boys.
Native Americans in Rathbun never dared admit they belonged to the Klan although there were suspicions about some of them, including the Scotts, our nearest neighbors.
The reign of terror lasted for about three years, although its peak was 1920–21. During that time my father always had a loaded rifle near his bed at night. We had quite a few boarders in this period. All of them had shotguns for hunting. My father let it be known that every man in our household had guns, ready for use, and if anyone dared come on our farm at night the men would shoot first and ask questions later. Nothing was touched on our place.
In order to keep the ignorant, prejudiced and poverty-stricken native Americans loyal to the Klan their leaders promised them that as soon as the "foreigners" were driven out the Klan leaders were going to give, I mean give, homes and farms to the native Americans. They went so far as to designate which house, which farm was to be given to whom. It was not unusual for a Rathbun resident to be approached on the street in Centerville by a Klan member and told, "You damned foreigner, when we drive you out I'm getting your house, free."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rank and File by Alice Lynd, Staughton Lynd. Copyright © 1981 Alice and Staughton Lynd. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Table of Contents, pg. v
- Preface to the Second Edition, pg. vii
- Acknowledgments, pg. x
- Introduction, pg. 1
- People Who Cannot Be Bought, pg. 9
- How I Became Part of the Labor Movement, pg. 35
- Back of the Yards, pg. 67
- Your Dog Don't Bark No More, pg. 89
- You Have to Fight for Freedom, pg. 111
- Liberi Cuori [Liberated Hearts], pg. 131
- I Appeal the Ruling of the Chair, pg. 149
- How the International Took Over, pg. 163
- The Informal Work Group, pg. 177
- Working for Survival, pg. 201
- It Got My Back Up, pg. 223
- An Absolute Majority, pg. 233
- Going for Broke, pg. 253
- A Common Bond, pg. 265
- Miners For Democracy, pg. 285
- List of Abbreviations, pg. 297