“The earthquake and fire in San Francisco was a terrible blow, but the menace of tyrannical organized labor is a blight and curse from which the city is now staggering and reeling like a drunken man.”
The Timberman, July 1907.
Very classy. Note–The Timberman was the least anti-worker major timber industry journal.
On January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. NAFTA intended to bring down trade barriers between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. After a long fight against NAFTA’s passage by labor, environmental groups, Mexican farmers, and many other constituencies, the support of President Bill Clinton clinched its success. Clinton promised that “NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t support this agreement.”
While judging the precise impact of NAFTA itself upon the number of employed Americans is complicated, NAFTA has had a highly negative impact upon high-paying blue-collar union jobs, a very bad environmental record, and did a great deal to spur the migration of Mexican farmers from the countryside and into the United States.
Even since the creation of the Border Industrialization Project in 1965, U.S. firms have had great incentive to move their operations to the Mexican side of the U.S. border. The Mexican government created BIP because it brought jobs to their country. American industry began lobbying the U.S. government to brush aside all barriers to globalization. As Jefferson Cowie shows in his fantastic book Capital Moves, American corporations had never bought into the Grand Bargain of the mid-twentieth century and looked to move away from unionized workplaces as soon as possible. When new factories in the United States, even in the South, proved too open for unionization, opening new factories in Mexico proved irresistible.
The passage of NAFTA allowed the fleeing of American manufacturing to enter its peak phase. Between 1994 and 2010, American trade deficits with Mexico were $97.2 billion, displacing 682,900 jobs. Of those, about 80% were in U.S. manufacturing jobs. Overall, since the passage of NAFTA, the United States has lost 5 million manufacturing jobs. Union membership plummeted. Today, only about 7% of American workers in private companies have union representation. In 1994, that number was 11%, down from 30% in 1965, when the Border Industrialization Project began. Companies used the threat of moving jobs to Mexico to force down wages and suppress unionization campaigns. Fearful of losing their jobs, American workers accepted rollback after rollback, but usually the companies eventually closed their American plants anyway.
NAFTA also spurred the migration of Mexicans into the maquiladoras, the cities, and the United States. While some will argue this is good for Mexicans (though anyone visiting Mexico City or Ciudad Juarez may have trouble making this argument), the reasons for it are really bad. American farm subsidies, a violation of NAFTA in spirit if not in rule, allowed American farm companies to dump commodities on the Mexican market. Soon, Mexican corn farmers could not compete with American corn and lost their land. Since 1994, approximately 1.3 million Mexicans have lose their farms or farm jobs. The states of central Mexico, including Jalisco, Guanajuato and Michoacan, where a huge number of farmers lost their land, have also been the states that have contributed the most migrants to the United States. In 2003, 1/3 of the Mexican migrants residing in the United States came from these states. Numbers of migrants have skyrocketed from the southern state of Oaxaca, largely again with agricultural workers moving north. Were the United States to have included humane immigration laws in NAFTA that might be one thing, but instead we have forced them into the desert to die.
American unions have tried to reach across the border and create transnational alliances between workers. When the textile industry moved en masse to Mexico, unions like UNITE sent delegations of workers to meet maquila workers in Mexico and gave them organizing advice and funds. But the major unions are part of the corporate structure of the Mexican government and have not exercised much if any independent action since the early 20th century. There are independent unions that struggle to survive, but between government discouragement, local intimidation of activists, and the same and worse anti-union activities by employers that you see in the United States, they have had a very difficult time getting off the ground. And the same threats of moving factories if workers form independent unions that provide real representation for labor that worked so well against American workers have been used in Mexico. After all, there are a lot of Hondurans looking for work, not infrequently because they have also lost access to the land and traditional farming economies.
While one may argue that NAFTA and American deindustrialization has created cleaner American environments, the Mexican environment has been severely denuded and degraded, particularly with the dumping of toxic chemicals and other pollutants. American environmental laws of the 1960s and 1970s forced companies to deal with pollutants responsibly. These companies did not see their profits depreciate significantly for this, but maximizing profit took priority to social and environmental responsibility. NAFTA also forced remaining Mexican farmers to depend ever more greatly on agrochemicals with poison both the land and the farmworkers who handle and are sprayed by them in the fields. Although it predates NAFTA, Angus Wright’s The Death of Ramon Gonzalez is a good primer on this issue.
The loss of manufacturing jobs due to NAFTA, other free trade agreements, and globalization more broadly has, I believe, helped contribute to the longevity of the economic downturn and threatens larger problems in the future. The promise of NAFTA was cheap products and information-based jobs that were easier on our bodies and allowed us to use our minds. But those jobs have hardly replaced well-paid manufacturing jobs and have left millions of older and poorly educated (disproportionately people of color) Americans behind. We managed to keep the charade of a successful new economy going for awhile, through the housing bubble and personal debt, but both have busted. Now we don’t know how to put people back to work. We have literally dismantled the infrastructure that would allowed us to put people to work in industrial labor. If the information economy doesn’t work and if there is little to no incentive for industries to open factories (or a government that doesn’t make it a priority), what is the long-term employment solution?
This series has also covered the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955 and the Homestead Strike of 1892.
Last year was a tough year for my Death List. Only Andy Rooney died. I’ve replaced him with Phyllis Diller. The rest are the same:
1. Bhumibol Adulyadej, King of Thailand
2. Mike Wallace
3. Margaret Thatcher
4. Rev. Sun Myung Moon
5. Fidel Castro
6. Luis Echeverria
7. Ernest Borgnine
8. Phyllis Diller
9. Clark Terry
10. Little Jimmy Dickens
Let the outrage at my moral turpitude begin.
Here’s another menu from the New York Public Library historical menu collection. This is from the Third Panel Sheriff’s Jury of New York County dinner, February 20, 1900.
I don’t know which soup to choose, the green turtle or the essence of grouse.
The rest of the menu booklet is very exciting, with 2 pages dedicated to the Star-Spangled Banner. Sounds like a fun time….
Another good piece on the worthlessness of the border fence. The fence itself just forces people desperate to cross into more dangerous and life-threatening situations. Undocumented immigration has declined the past few years since jobs in the U.S. have dried up and since Obama increased the number of work visas for Mexicans; the border fence had little or nothing to do with it. The fence is incredibly expensive to maintain and is at best an impediment to easy crossing. It’s also an environmental disaster. Meanwhile, the fence does nothing to stop the real danger of the border–drug smuggling:
At night, smugglers toss Hail Marys of pot-stuffed footballs and fling golf-ball-sized heroin nuggets over to waiting receivers. Stealthy ultra-light aircraft bomb the lettuce fields outside town with bundles of dope, then swoop back into Mexico, well below radar but high above the fence.
So long as there are cities on the border, smuggling will occur with impunity.
Of course, the border goes two ways and the U.S. has zero interest in stopping the real driver of mass murder in northern Mexico–the unregulated purchase of guns that are sent to Mexico.
On December 30, 1905, former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg walked home after a snowstorm in Caldwell, Idaho. When he arrived he pulled open his outside gate, triggering a bomb that blew him ten feet into the air and killing him. The assassination of Steunenberg led to one of the biggest show trials in American history, as prosecutors decided to try several leading American radicals, most notably Western Federation of Miners executive and future Industrial Workers of the World head Big Bill Haywood.
Steunenberg
Steunenberg had arrived in Idaho from Iowa in 1887, quickly getting involved in local politics. In 1890, he was elected to the state legislature and in 1896 won the governorship at the head of a Democratic/Populist fusion ticket. Like a lot of Populists (William Jennings Bryan to his credit was an exception), Steunenberg was elected with labor support but became a tool of corporate power once he achieved office. The mines of northern Idaho were a hotbed of radicalism in the 1890s. The Western Federation of Miners, precursor to the I.W.W., were organizing workers around their terrible wages and working conditions, as well as violent suppression of unionization through the use of Pinkerton spies to fire anyone who signed a union card.
The miners had two reasons to elect Steunenberg. First, he claimed to represent working-class interests. Second, many of these miners were working in silver and silver coinage was a key part of the Populist platform. But when the workers went on strike in 1899, Steunenberg betrayed them, taking bribes from the miners to crush the strike.
Steunenberg declared martial law and convinced William McKinley to send in federal troops to crush the strike. Hundreds of activists were rounded up and kept in stockades for months without trial. Steunenberg stated, “We have taken the monster by the throat and we are going to choke the life out of it. No halfway measures will be adopted. It is a plain case of the state or the union winning, and we do not propose that the state shall be defeated.”
In 1900, Steunenberg retired from politics. His assassination five years later by Harry Orchard, a paid agent of the Canyon Creek Mine Owners’ Association, was bizarre. It’s not entirely clear even today why Orchard did it. He had a history of violence, some of it against scabs, but there’s also significant evidence that he was on the payroll of the mining companies. Orchard agreed to a lighter sentence by implicating the old WFM leadership, including Haywood and WFM president Charles Moyer. Orchard claimed, absurdly, that Haywood and the WFM had hired him to kill Steunenberg. Moyer was arrested attempting to escape to Canada; Haywood while having sex with his sister-in-law.
Haywood
The trial took place in 1907 in Boise. Clarence Darrow represented Haywood. Darrow completely dominated the leading prosecutor, James Hawley, a nationally famous lawyer in his own right, objecting to nearly everything and flustering Hawley repeatedly. Darrow called Haywood himself to the stand, where he stood up well to heavy questioning (being obviously innocent of the charges helped). The defense attacked Steunenberg himself for the murder, noting that for whatever reason Orchard, who had a long history of violence, killed the ex-governor, the man pretty much deserved what he got for his horrible treatment of miners in 1899. The defense also accused the Pinkertons of the murder, saying they and mine owners had the governor killed to destroy the WFM once and for all.
Haywood’s Trial
Finally, Darrow delivered his final statement for the defense.
I have known Haywood. I have known him well and I believe in him. I do believe in him. God knows it would be a sore day to me if he should ascend the scaffold; the sun would not shine or the birds would not sing on that day for me. It would be a sad day indeed if any calamity should befall him. I would think of him, I would think of his mother, I would think of his babes, I would think of the great cause that he represents. It would be a sore day for me.
But, gentlemen, he and his mother, his wife and his children are not my chief concern in this case. If you should decree that he must die, ten thousand men will work down in the mines to send a portion of the proceeds of their labor to take care of that widow and those orphan children, and a million people throughout the length and the breadth of the civilized world will send their messages of kindness and good cheer to comfort them in their bereavement. It is not for them I plead.
Other men have died, other men have died in the same cause in which Bill Haywood has risked his life, men strong with devotion, men who love liberty, men who love their fellow men have raised their voices in defense of the poor, in defense of justice, have made their good fight and have met death on the scaffold, on the rack, in the flame and they will meet it again until the world grows old and gray. Bill Haywood is no better than the rest. He can die if die he needs, he can die if this jury decrees it; but, oh, gentlemen, don’t think for a moment that if you hang him you will crucify the labor movement of the world.
Don’t think that you will kill the hopes and the aspirations and the desires of the weak and the poor, you men, unless you people who are anxious for this blood–are you so blind as to believe that liberty will die when he is dead? Do you think there are no brave hearts and no other strong arms, no other devoted souls who will risk their life in that great cause which has demanded martyrs in every age of this world? There are others, and these others will come to take his place, will come to carry the banner where he could not carry it.
Gentlemen, it is not for him alone that I speak. I speak for the poor, for the weak, for the weary, for that long line of men who in darkness and despair have borne the labors of the human race. The eyes of the world are upon you, upon you twelve men of Idaho tonight. Wherever the English language is spoken, or wherever any foreign tongue known to the civilized world is spoken, men are talking and wondering and dreaming about the verdict of these twelve men that I see before me now. If you kill him your act will be applauded by many. If you should decree Bill Haywood’s death, in the great railroad offices of our great cities men will applaud your names. If you decree his death, amongst the spiders of Wall Street will go up paeans of praise for those twelve good men and true who killed Bill Haywood. In every bank in the world, where men hate Haywood because he fights for the poor and against the accursed system upon which the favored live and grow rich and fat–from all those you will receive blessings and unstinted praise.
But if your verdict should be “Not Guilty,” there are still those who will reverently bow their heads and thank these twelve men for the life and the character they have saved. Out on the broad prairies where men toil with their hands, out on the wide ocean where men are are tossed and buffeted on the waves, through our mills and factories, and down deep under the earth, thousands of men and of women and children, men who labor, men to suffer, women and children weary with care and toil, these men and these women and these children will kneel tonight and ask their God to guide your judgment. These men and these women and these little children, the poor, the weak, and the suffering of the world will stretch out their hands to this jury, and implore you to save Haywood’s life.
Darrow thought the jury would find Haywood guilty. They did not. To everyone’s shock, they acquitted him.
It was hardly the last time the government would look to railroad Haywood on dubious charges. He was charged in 1918 for sedition after he urged a strike in a wartime industry. He fled to the Soviet Union while on bond in 1921, living there unhappily until his death in 1928.
Harry Orchard was sentenced to death, had his sentence commuted to life in prison, and died behind bars in 1954.
J. Anthony Lukas has written the most famous book on this case. Lukas committed suicide immediately upon completing the book in 1997.
This series has also covered the Everett Massacre of 1916 and the creation of the CIO in 1935.
I love historical menus. The New York Public Library has a fantastic selection up, asking for people to check the transcriptions. This might mean there are some check marks over menu items, but you can click those off and get a sense of what restaurants used to serve. As an example, here are a couple of pages the menu from Cronin’s, March 3, 1961.
I don’t know about you, but I could use the occasional 55 cent Manhattan.
Thus is the title of Elizabeth Kolbert’s excoriation of the Obama Administration for fighting European attempts to regulate airline emissions. Rather than support European leadership on the issue, the Obama Administration is threatening a trade war against European nations.
Nowhere has Obama been more disappointing than on environmental issues. This is precisely the kind of issue where the executive can provide leadership. Yet Obama has been reticent to issue many strong environmental regulations or to protect land. Beginning with his appointment of Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Interior, continuing to his opening the east coast to offshore drilling without getting a single thing in return on climate change legislation from the Republicans, and now opposing regulating airline emissions, Obama has been an environmental disaster for a Democratic president.
Like on many issues, we should not look back to Bill Clinton as a better Democrat on the environment. He probably was, but only in his last year. As with labor and other consistuencies, Obama has continued a string of Democratic disappointments. Certainly the legislative climate is not conducive to leading on the airline emission issue, but Obama could also issue executive orders, craft regulations, or even do nothing. Instead, he is following the bidding of the airline industry, continuing America’s role as the climate bad guy of the planet.
Kolbert:
It’s pretty much impossible to imagine how the world can reduce the risks of climate change without imposing some sort of emissions limits, and airline emissions seems like as good a place to start as any. If the Administration disagrees with the European plan, then it would seem to be under a heavy obligation to propose its own. All it’s doing now is shilling for the airlines. Is this any way to run a planet?
Indeed.
Excellent Peter Birkenhead piece at Alternet on the exclusion of slavery on private plantation home tours in the South. Slave cabins are being turned into spas and restaurants rather than spaces of remembering our national shame.
If America is a family, it’s a family that has tacitly agreed to never speak again — not with much honesty, anyway — about the terrible things that went on in its divided house. Slavery has been taught, it has been written about. There can’t be many subjects that rival it as an academic ink-guzzler. But the culture has not digested slavery in a meaningful way, hasn’t absorbed it the way it has World War II or the Kennedy assassination. We don’t feel the connections to it in our bones. It’s hard enough these days to connect with what happened 15 minutes ago, let alone 15 decades, given the endless layers of “classic,” “heirloom,” “traditional” “collectible,” “old school” comfort we’re swaddled in. But isn’t it the least we could do? What is the willful forgetting of slavery if not the coverup of a crime, an abdication of responsibility to its victims and to ourselves?
There are pretty clear reasons why we don’t remember slavery as we do WWII or Kennedy. World War II was one of the very few events in American history that truly united the nation, not to mention ending the Depression. We could truly paint ourselves as the good guys facing the bad guys and not be wrong. Combined with the wealth then produced by that generation after the war and the rise of television to broadcast it all, it’s became a story of celebration. Kennedy’s assassination is not a celebration, but is rather the touchstone event in the lives of the baby boomers which have dominated American life for the last half-century or more. Kennedy allows boomers to tell stories about themselves.
Slavery on the other hand is a terrible thing with no positive story at the end, unless you are Pat Buchanan and long for the days of Jim Crow. We still live with the effects of slavery today and we don’t want to remember it because it means we then have to think about race in America. Even the young people I teach who might be politically progressive are, by and large, allergic to discussions of race, even more so than class and way more than gender and sexuality. We can talk about Native Americans but the stories we tell ourselves about them are wrapped in our own mythology and the general (and very false) assumption that outside a few people running casinos, they are gone. But slavery, that’s a hot and very uncomfortable topic. And not only on Louisiana plantation tours.
Douglas Bevington’s 2009 book explores how grassroots environmental organizations reinvigorated the environmental movement through their focus on biodiversity and its aggressive litigation strategy over political alliances and mass mailing funding drives. Painting the big national environmental organizations as sluggish at best by the 1980s, he shows how grassroots activists came out of Earth First! forest campaigns to save the spotted owl and forced the government to enforce its laws and save species. Bevington (a forest activist with a PhD in sociology) has a major axe to grind against the national environmental organizations with this book, but it’s also hard to say he’s wrong about how change in our relationship with nature is created.
In Bevington’s view, grassroots activists are far more effective in creating environmental change than mainstream organizations. The national organizations such as the Sierra Club at best do nothing, at worse provide significant impediments for environmental change because of their support of the Democratic Party, fear of losing a seat at the table, and the conservatism of their funders. Litigation has proven the most effective strategy in creating environmental change, particularly revolving around ideas of biodiversity. Particularly in the Headwaters Forest Campaign to protect a large grove of privately owned redwoods from development in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the big national organizations preferred compromise to saving the forests. Their desire to have a seat at the table, he argues, often means crafting anti-environmental legislation. Bevington quotes Doug Scott, national conservation of the Sierra Club, defending his working with Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield to write legislation bad for the forests because “I want to be in the room talking in his ear. He may not vote the way I want but at least I’m talking to him.” Perhaps this strategy makes electoral sense, but does it protect ecosystems? Bevington and grassroots environmentalists argued no and worked against the Sierra Club for their ultimate goal.
This story is not unlike that of labor, in that the AFL-CIO has committed to Democratic Party support that has allowed that party to ignore working-class concerns in crafting legislation. Grassroots activists unconcerned with the desires of traditional leadership and using the courts to enforce laws have proven far more effective making one wonder about the ability of labor activists and independent unions to do the same.
The radical roots of many grassroots activists is central to Bevington’s analysis. Many Center for Biological Diversity and logging activists came out of Earth First! and were disinclined to compromise. With the renewal of radicalism in America, what does this mean for environmentalism? Occupy Wall Street has not centered environmental concerns very highly. OWS may well be great news for labor and working-class issues over the next decades as young activists trained in the streets in 2011 spend their careers fighting for economic justice.
From an environmental perspective, where are the next generation of radical activists coming from? I’ve been honored to teach many young people over the past several years who intend to commit their lives to environmental activism. What I get from them is a real sense of pragmatism and emphasis on the local and community over the national and international. I absolutely do not mean this as a criticism, strictly an observation. Young environmentalists are conscious in ways their movement ancestors were not of the relationship between environmental and economic justice and this has focused greater attention on urban communities and environmental justice. Bevington suggests how the use of the Endangered Species Act by grassroots environmental groups can be applied to the challenges of global warming, using the listing of the polar bear as an example. But I am remain unconvinced by this, because where I see the grassroots activism forming is primarily around food and building locally sustainable communities. Perhaps the challenges of climate change are so overwhelming that the embrace of the local gives people something to cling to. I know that my students have been far more interested in environmental histories that suggest the possibilities of sustainability in the past and present than traditional declensionist narratives showing how we have messed everything up. They already know that and want to move on to figuring out what they can do to change the world. This certainly doesn’t mean that Bevington is wrong about the ability of grassroots activists to take the lead on fighting climate change, nor does it mean that this won’t happen. But my own experience and observation suggests a lot more interest in gardens than polar bears among young activists.
Bevington clearly intends his history of grassroots environmentalism and the ESA over the past 25 years to be a guide for future activists, but I think it may be more effective as history. He shows how small groups of committed people can overcome significant organizational and legislative obstacles to create deep and meaningful change in the world, something that, like civil rights, gay rights, abortion rights and other social movements, provide inspirational and functional lessons for modern activists.
It’s typical that The Economist would spend a bunch of space in its story on how Belgium came to dominate the world beer market on the worst beer to come out of that country (Stella Artois, though I hope I didn’t have to tell you that), but it’s still an interesting read.
I’m not so sure the future of world beer (and maybe the present) is in the United States, but per capita, there’s no question the Belgians are the kings.
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
