Comrades in the Library
The Times has an article on one of my favorite places in the world, the Tamiment Institute archives at NYU, which has recently acquired a huge chunk of the Communist Party USA’s files. The CP should really be applauded for its openness and willingness to view its past truly as history. I have seen some of the neato gems of these files – such as Seeger’s handwritten lyrics to “Turn! Turn! Turn!” – on display while doing my own research at the library.
It was there that I recently found Michael Obermeier’s letter to Jay Rubin. The letter would have provided much-needed pathos to the term paper that I ultimately wrote about the Communists who founded New York’s Hotel Employees union, who were ultimately thrown out early in the Cold War. The letter was meticulously misfiled away with Rubin’s correspondence from the 1970’s (he must have kept the letter close at hand until the end of his tenure). Most of the union’s files are archived at Tamiment, so I’ve spent much time there.
I’ve continued to write about the union in term papers on its organizing strategy, its health care politics and its collective bargaining. I will ultimately flesh out my earlier term paper on the Communist influence and betrayal in Local 6 in my Masters thesis, which I hope to have published (which is why I have hesitated to post that earlier paper on this site).
In the meantime, I gather as much material as I can. I FOIA FBI and INS files, seek out sister unions’ files and living relatives of the main players. The Communist Party’s archives are quite promising for my research, although the most explosive material was likely shipped over to the Soviet Union in the late 1940’s. It exists today at the Library of Congress and at Tamiment as a microfiche reproduction of the source material in Moscow. The files are indexed in Russian, so I will likely need some translation assistance, tovarich.
Letter From Munich, 1953
Munich, June 12, 1953
Dear Jay,
It’s over a half a year now, since we stood on that ship to say goodby. You asked me to write and I promised to do so. To tell you the truth I hesitated because I did not want to be carried away with my feelings. I was a very disappointed man, not because of the court proceedings, the prison, ect. but because of my so called friends, the last days in the Union, the way Georgette was treated and Sindeys promises were certainly an agony to go through with. If you took away the carfare from the collection money for Georgette, she could not have existed on the support. She took the bus only to save money and she could have visited me more often but $30 was too much. Many a guest of Local 6 was more expensive that all the Local spend. You certainly cannot count the court and lawyers expenses of which nothing came to me. I am sure I saved many others a lot of troubles and I could have had an easy way out. All those that knew my dilemma from the beginning and insisted on holding the fort have certainly some obligations. All ratting came from within the International as you know. O yes I was in Dachau the other day and some fellows seem to know a certain Dutchman’s past his name was Hausend and later Hownsend. Very interesting how he became anti Nazi all of a sudden.
Since I am here I was mostly busy with my affairs. The only political demonstration I witnessed was May 1st. Somehow I was drenched by the police after the big meeting. It was very interesting and reminded me on the early days on Union Square. The water was easyer than theirs and the police men were rather hesitating but efficient. There was less of the bunch of foreigner attitude. I had lots of problems with my papers, also to find a place to stay for me and Georgette. The temporary room with my mother and sister could not be counted on. My mother is 86 and a sick person. Her mind is in her childhood as she has a hardening of the arteries. She does not recognize me any more only from the past she remembers. Rooms are scarce and expensive. They wanted from 200 to 400 marks a month for a furnished place. I finally arranged with my brother to let me built a big room in his house. What a job to get permission but all was ready when Georgette came although most of it was built illegal. So we have a room with all the comfort. We raise chickens, have our eggs, our vegetables, our fruits. I get the food wholesale. We are managing. The building and all the expenses since we left amount to $7000, so we are now depending on the income from the Flushing mortgage of 82.50 a month which is fine if nothing happens. It seems that the old age pension I counted on is very questionable. I can always take care of myself as you said but it is an irony that I fought far far back for pension and security, I had it on the old Hotelworker program in 1917 and now I have such a tight squeeze. Hugo Ernst did not object to 50 a week that time. And the testimonial. He wanted me to get a body guard so everything could be safely transferred. Lehman in Local 1 gets 25 a week. So some of our officers realize what price I am paying. I was not impressed by that editorial in Local 6 about me. It was carefully worded that I had something to do with the Hotel Workers but it did not need Local 89 to answer 15. Did I not serve time before in fighting injunctions. Those were 20 years before 6 and we always had a Union. Even my wife worked and my children saw me in jail when they were 6 years old. That a blackmailer like Ventura should get a job is not understandable to me in my old fashioned Union concept. That fruit basket presented by Herman was certainly a joke. Anybody traveling on a Swedish ship knows that you get all the fruit and canned fish you want and candy is poison for me as a diabetic person. The Swedish stewardesses send their thanks, as I did not want trouble with the rostrum duties. I would have liked the money much better and could use it. I had some troubles about my papers – first my registration, had to trace my ancestors 3 generations, then I needed my identification card. Had to see the Chief Justice of the Bavarian Court and the Police Commissioner, ect. Luckily my brother is well known. To get my passport I had to go to Bonn. American pressure was there all over and after 3 months I got it. By the way Kay’s brother is in a real top position. He is nat’l President of the Government employees and has access all over. Finally I became a divisininlandzerman. I can work, get a job, have a car. They had my money stopped in the bank until I passed all that. I need a briefcase just to carry my papers with me. I wanted to drive a car and had to go to auto drivers school and pass a police test with all sorts of theoretical questions. Everything the hard way. MY New York license was canceled, me being a felon. One thing the German union officials were very nice and were concerned if I needed assistance. They offered direct help which I would be ashamed to take. I must say that the generous help of Local 89 had helped to provide me with a few comforts.
So you have an idea how I feel and what I do. My best regards to all friends and I will get around to write a few soon. Hoping you are in good health.
I remain with best wishes,
Mike
The Two Barbaras
What kind of readers find Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent books remotely edifying? How far up their own asses are these people? I have to admit that I’ve yet to read the book in which she passes for working poor, although I did read her earlier piece in Harper’s magazine that served as a teaser. The fact that some of the lowest-paid service workers have to live in motels because they can’t afford a full month’s rent on an apartment was the only revelation for me (in New York, even our motels are too expensive, so people cram dozens of bodies in small apartments). Do you want to know how the poor live? Talk to your janitor, waitress or telemarketer. The paucity of actual interviews in Ehrenreich’s books saps the story of emotional resonance and dulls her political points.
This tendency is exacerbated in “Bait and Switch,” in which our supposed heroine poses as a white collar corporate job seeker. That corporate downsizing can cause the lives of the white-collar unemployed to spiral right out of the middle class and out of control is, indeed, a story worth telling. But Barbara Ehrenreich doesn’t tell it here. Instead, by going undercover as a PR executive on the job market seeking to enter the corporate world she was never a part of, Ehrenreich gives us 237 pages of a totally misguided job hunt. Parasitic image consultants and job hunt advisors sap her of thousands of dollars over the course of a fruitless year-long search. That says more about her poor choices and lack of support network as a corporate novice. Throughout, she trips over desperate, embittered job seekers – former corporate success stories who were thrown overboard by their employers in middle age – whose plight and occasionally populist gripes about modern capitalism who would be far more fascinating subject matter, but Ehrenreich’s self-indulgent format does not allow for interviews with them.
For some reason, Barbara Ehrenreich is inextricably linked in my mind with fellow socialist and author Barbara Garson. Like Ehrenreich, Garson is a humorist who attempts to grapple with major economic issues in an accessible manner. I recently re-read one of her earliest books, “All the Livelong Day,” which I am including in the theoretical syllabus of the Labor Studies 101 class I’d like to teach one day. Spurred on by curiosity about Big Concepts like Taylorism and “alienation of labor,” Garson innocently asks, “what about the workers?”
While she, too, poses as a worker in a 9 to 5 job to write about the effects of mind-numbing routine on her psyche, this is merely one short chapter. The rest of the book is full of wonderful interviews with workers (Barbara G. is a playwright first and has a wonderful ear for dialogue and an eye for detail) about how they view themselves and their jobs and how they make the time go by. These details – like the woman who daydreams about sex while pulling red meat from white at the Bumble Bee tuna factory or the office pool secretary who amuses herself by typing in a rhythm with her coworkers – really make the text come alive and provoke the reader to think about his or her own private thoughts at work, all while illuminating fairly dense economic theory. Her books are far more deserving of best-seller status, and worth your attention.
More On Inequality Sickness
Following up on my previous post, in case I wasn’t clear (“Are you following me?”), here is a simple graph that argues much more clearly that inequality is making us sicker:
This chart represents diabetes rates by income group (divided simply into thirds; the richest third of the population, the middle third and the poorest third) in the UK and the US. First, note that the poorer you are, the likelier you are to have diabetes. In America, this is not surprising, because our poor lack health care. In the UK, however, the poor has the same health care as the rich (or at least the middle class), and yet they are still more likely to have diabetes, although not nearly as likely as their American counterparts.
But now, compare the poorest Brits to the richest Americans. Lower rates of diabetes! Both groups receive similar quality of health care, so what accounts for it? Surely, it can’t be the average British consumption of fish and chips, lager and fags. What the research is pointing to is a surprising correlation between inequitable income distribution in any given country, and higher rates of disease and death across all income groups.