Hard Times (53 page)

 

 

We had lean years. But we did get to far more people. People had time, all kinds of time. In the early Thirties, up to ‘35, everybody might be flat broke, but they’d find a way of gettin’ to a meeting.

 

 

Oh, there was a lot of talk. But there was no anticipation that we were about to take over the works and run it. The IWW felt only an organized working class could do it. A working class that wasn’t allowed to eat the food it produced … that had to go with patches on its ass after it had made too many clothes … was a working class that could be browbeat. A working class that had to beg for a soup bone wasn’t a class that could take this world and run it. They had to organize first.

I ran into some ill-informed people who used the word revolution very carelessly—that things were so tough, we were going to have a revolution and so forth. I didn’t run into any person who had given serious thought as to how you make one. I’d want a revolution. Sure, I’d like one now. But the circumstances are not propitious for havin’ one, and they weren’t in 1931, ’32. It isn’t just a bunch of starving people that are going to
make a revolution. It’s gonna be a people that have been asserting themselves….

 

 

When he died, I remember an obituary in our paper: “He was hated by those he had helped and loved by those he had harmed.” A good many Wobblies felt that was hitting it right on the head. He made a big hullabaloo about what he was gonna do for labor. After he had labor by the tail, he seemed to figure he could disregard it and favor our enemy instead.

Here was an economic system that had quit work. The logical remedy would have been for a working class to assert itself: we want at least enough of what we produce so we can keep on working. But you didn’t have that kind of labor action. Consequently, the pigs who had been stopping the things from working by their own greed didn’t disgorge anything. But certain adjustments were made that allowed people to eat. At the time of Hoover, you could use federal funds to feed animals, but not to feed people. It was up to your neighbors, he said.

 

 

I don’t know as he hurt it. He changed the situation. He did cause most people to feel if you could only find a good man and put him in office, he’ll fix everything for you, and you can go back to sleep now. He certainly didn’t help radicalism.

The kind of labor movement that grew up, that we have today, still has this birthmark. Unionism by permit—the NLRB, things of that sort.

In the early Thirties, there was a resurgence of an almost dead labor movement. There were various radical activities: the Trotskyites up in Minneapolis, the Communists over there in Toledo, the Socialists there, Wobblies in Cleveland, Detroit and so on. The union literature was like the labor literature of a century ago—looking toward a successor to capitalism. Industrial democracy. In which you have a cooperative commune, you have a brotherhood of man. Even though the issue of the moment was five cents more an hour or better files for metal finishers to work with.

… The literature carried a vision.

But then you saw, in the coal towns of Pennsylvania—Lewis and the CIO—great big banners: “The President Wants You to Join the Union.” It worked. So radicalism was replaced by something else. The Government had set up a way. Just sign your name, your authorization card. You can do it quite secretly, you don’t have to be a hero any more. We can all vote in a union election, and nobody will know how you voted. Of course, the boss will have to recognize the union, and nobody will really have had to stick his neck out.

When I was a kid, if somebody asked me to define a grievance, I’d say it’s something we don’t like. Today, a grievance is something not in accordance with standards of arbitration. We’re even
told
what
the hell to be dissatisfied with these days. (Laughs.)

When I was a kid, the union was
us
guys, what we collectively did. Nowadays, people don’t speak of the union as us. Almost everywhere, the union is
it
or
they
.

There is a growing perception that we should have something other than capitalism. But people aren’t excited about it. It’s a strange thing. I hardly find anybody today who doesn’t agree that the ledger should not determine how we live. Most people think it’s terrible that the pollution of Lake Michigan is being decided by how much it’ll cost companies to cure it. People are realizing that an environment is being created that will be as dangerous for capitalists to live in as well as for working people … that it’s insane to let major things be decided on the basis of black figures and red figures.

I find temperate people saying today that the business-motivated system isn’t a safe thing to have around. (Laughs.) But I think there is less intensity of feeling.

I think a sense of powerlessness, of fatalism, has been growing from the Thirties. Then, we just felt we didn’t have the power, the organization. We never felt we were
inherently
incapable of achieving it.

The thing that gives me the most cheer are the young people today. You find them all over the world, having a sense of common fate. They’re the least bookish radicals I’ve ever known, but the most literate. In the Thirties, a guy read some kind of book and he wanted everything to go according to that text. Today, these college kids use books simply for insights. They don’t have a dogma. They’re far more flexible, far more open-minded, far more feeling.
They
have the feeling….

 

I HAD A FELLOWSHIP in criminology at the University of Chicago. My job was to get insight into crime. So I got in with the Capone mob and was with them for two years. I had enough of those classes in social pathology, social disorientation and all that crap.

 

 

I hung around the Lexington Hotel. It was their headquarters. I laughed at all the terrible jokes of Big Ed, one of the boys. He liked me and took me around. Different guys taught me the various operations. Jesus, did I learn! I learned what a fucked-up world this really is.

If you wanted to do something about crime, you had to start with the nice people, the respectable ones. I’d go around with a guy who headed the committee against vice. He owned a tenement, with call girls on every floor.

I found organized crime to be a huge, quasi-public utility. This was during the last years of Prohibition. People wanted beer, they wanted whiskey, they wanted broads, they wanted gambling and all the other stuff. It was a corporation. Everybody owned stock in it: City Hall, Democrats, Republicans, the world….

Somewhere along the line, my interest in criminology waned. I remember my student days when I was starving and pulling funny rackets on restaurants, just to survive. Once, I came close to kicking in the goddam window of Henrici’s.
¹³⁶
People were in there eating steaks about this thick and my stomach was empty. As a kid was telling me of an A & P store he robbed and another of a gas station he heisted, Hitler and Mussolini were robbing whole countries and killing whole peoples. I found it difficult to listen to small-time confessions. Most of my time was spent in anti-fascist and CIO activities.

That’s how I found myself Back of the Yards. It was the nadir of all the slums of America, worse than Harlem is today. You had this dingy, gray mile-by-two-miles of track, south of the big slaughterhouses. Clapboard frame houses, one behind the other. Many of them with outhouses. The neighborhood was practically all Catholic. You never saw so many churches. It made Rome look like a Protestant Gothic town.

At this point, I decided to get the hell out of academic work and go in
for mass organization. I had certain concepts I couldn’t follow through on as a professional. If you’re an academic and you’re controversial, you’re in trouble. You had to organize around issues, and all issues were controversial.

I wanted to test out my ideas. Ideas on organization for change. If they would work in Back of the Yards, they would work anywhere. If you wanted to do something about crime and despair, you had to do something about its causes.

There were a lot of fascist groups in the area. It wasn’t accidental. If you cut away a lot of your so-called political science analysis of why a totalitarian society develops, it comes down to this: If you’re out of it, the demagogue comes along and says, “Follow me.” If you haven’t got a goddam thing to lose, you follow him. Isn’t that what happened in Germany?

There was a Benedictine priest, who was leading the Coughlinite movement around there. He was making speeches denouncing international Jewry. He had psyched out, because nobody had paid him any attention. He had about fifty followers. This was his only place in the world. So I made him chairman of the neighborhood’s anti-fascist committee. He now had a thousand followers instead of fifty. He became one of the best anti-fascist apostles of the democratic process. He was given a sense of personal identification.

I’m going around organizing, agitating, making trouble. At the end of three months, I had the Catholic Church, the CIO and the Communist Party working together. It involved the Packinghouse Workers Union. I even got the American Legion involved, because they didn’t have a goddam thing to do. They all had one thing in common: misery. Powerlessness.

I’d go in to see this Catholic priest. I’d say, “I heard your sermon denouncing the union, calling it Communist. You know something, Father? Your people nodded and then walked out and joined the union. Know why? They’re unemployed, their families are shot to hell and you’re not doing a God damn thing about it. You sit on your ass in the sacristy, and you’re no longer a shepherd of your flock. Everybody is disregarding you. You want to be a leader? Get back with your people, get out in the streets and fight for the union. The enemy is the meat packer; the enemy is low wages.” So he’d do it. Purely on the basis of self-interest.

You don’t talk Judaic-Christian moral principles to a priest, a rabbi or a minister. They wouldn’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

I had difficulty with only one priest. He was Irish. The Poles of the area had church wedding ceremonies involving bells. It broke down to a buck and a half a pull. The Irish priest passed the word around that he’d perform with bells at a buck a pull. The Polish shepherd went off his rocker. He said to me, “You’re the guy who talks about people getting together, that we’ll have power and so on. If you can get that Irishman to come
back to the regular price, we’ll join your organization. Otherwise, forget it.”

So I went down to see the Irish priest. I made the mistake of posing the question on purely spiritual grounds. He told me to mind my own business. So I said, “O.K., I looked over the receipts of your last summer’s carnival. Your big fund raising affair. You made $18,000. I’ll see to it, when the time comes for your carnival, the CIO, the American Legion, the Chamber of Commerce and every other church in this community will have some kind of affair on the same date. We’ll rip your carnival apart. The most you can make at a buck a pull, assume you get all the wedding business, is ten grand. You’ll drop eighteen.” He ordered me out.

About ten minutes later, the phone rings. He reconsidered. On moral principles, of course. He was up to a buck thirty-five a pull. So I got three Polish churches to join the Back-of-the-Yards Council. So it went: different tactics for different circumstances.

John L. Lewis heard of it. He wasn’t happy. The CIO was merely one component, and he wanted it to be the dog with the community as its tail. But he was converted. He offered me a job at $25,000 a year. All I had to do was go around the country organizing CIO unions into industrial communities. I turned him down, though I admired him, and my heart was with the CIO.

Three weeks later, Roosevelt called me to the White House. What a personality! What presence! He offered me a job as assistant director of the NYA. My job was simply to organize young Democrats across the country. Again, though my heart was with the New Deal, I said no.

These were the two most remarkable men of the decade. Why did I reject these offers? Easy. The secret of the Back-of-the-Yards Council —and all the other organizations I worked at since—was: The people weren’t fronting for anyone. It was
their own
program.

In the Thirties, I learned what is to me the big idea: providing people with a sense of power. Not just the poor. There is nothing especially noble about the poor. Everybody. That time may have been our most creative period. It was a decade of involvement. It’s a cold world now. It was a hot world then.