By Tom Dodge
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-922096.mp3
Dallas, TX –
Labor Day to many means burgers and leisure, but commentator Tom Dodge reminds us there's much more to commemorate.
As a teacher I tried to teach Labor Day's deeper meanings as I had learned them many years before from my own teacher. While other history professors focused on the War Between the States, Egal Feldman concentrated on the War between Labor and the Plutocrats. This war had mighty generals too. For the labor side there were Eugene V. Debs, John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, and others. Their only weapons were courage and right. Opposing generals, super-rich industrialists, had names like Vanderbilt, Duke, and Gould, and were backed by armed federal troops, marshals and local police.
There were female generals in this war, too, fighting against the forces that would keep them subservient and dependent on men. Margaret Sanger was one, and Jane Addams, and from my hometown of Cleburne, Lucy Ella Gonzales Parsons, whose husband Albert Parsons was one of the "usual suspects" hanged for their alleged participation in Chicago's infamous Haymarket Affair.
When I was in Dr. Feldman's class I was a member of the local chapter of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen and laid off at the time from my job with the Texas and Pacific railroad. Brenda and I had two babies and were living only on railroad unemployment. I sold my railroad watch to buy baby formula.
When he learned this, he gave me a job as his student assistant, which consisted mainly of grading essays and tests. This extra money allowed me to stay in college while I was out of work.
Ironically, he had no union to support him in his dispute with the college authorities when he tried to help students form a campus chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. So he left Texas and went to the University of Wisconsin- Superior, where he taught from 1966 until he retired in1994. He also lectured for a year at the Sorbonne in Paris and wrote books that took awards. Some, like Dual Destinies: The Jewish Encounter with Protestant America, are listed on Amazon.com.
I was surprised that he also became the chairman of the history department for sixteen years and for four years was the Dean of Science and Letters. I wonder if he wavered in his support of workers.
In any case, his influence on me hasn't diminished, especially today in view of American dependence on immigrant labor during the housing boom. In Midlothian, where I live, contractors have built houses on seemingly every square inch of ground in the last decade. Worksites all look the same: a white boss working for the white contractor, and a crew of low-paid immigrant carpenters, doing everything except plumbing and wiring. They could do these too but would have to be certified and would then be able to demand certified wages.
Labor Day began September 6, 1894, to honor workers with a paid holiday to march in their parades. This is what President Grover Cleveland said. But a few months earlier, he had used the military to break the Pullman sleeping car strike, in which a number of strikers were killed. So what Labor Day effectively commemorates, Dr. Feldman told us many years ago, is the government's continuing willingness to support the plutocracy in its use of others in any way it sees fit to do the work, as cheaply as possible, work that it is unwilling, and unable, to do itself.
Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian.
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