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Remembering Sophie Gerson

I learned today from a comrade that Sophie Gerson passed away on March 20, 2006 at the age of 96. Sophie was a lifelong Communist activist whose own work was overshadowed by her husband, Simon W. Gerson, the writer, champion of proportional democracy and shoulda been City Councilman from Brooklyn. At Si’s memorial a year earlier, speaker after speaker (including yours truly) paid tribute to his illustrious career as a public Communist and lightning rod for controversy, but only one (not me, perhaps it was Tim Wheeler) took the opportunity to point out that Sophie was notorious–indeed, framed for murder–before Si’s name was ever known.

In early 1929, 19-year-old Sophie Melvin joined striking National Textile Workers Union members at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, NC. The Gastonia strike, one of NTWU’s smallest at the time, was part of a larger southern organizing campaign initiated by the Communist-led Trade Union Unity League. The T.U.U.L. presaged the C.I.O. movement in the 30’s, training many of activists whose work made that mass upsurge possible. The strike was called in January over some of the lowest-paying, most sped up and stretched out working conditions in the entire south.

Sophie organized a children’s support section in the strikers’ tent city and was present on June 7 when a carload of armed police invaded and declared war on the strikers. In the melee, one union organizer was seriously wounded, three police deputies were slightly wounded and the chief of police, O.F. Aderholt, was killed. Seventy-five strikers were arrested for the murder of the police chief and sixteen were eventually indicted. Among these were three women, Vera Buch, Amy Shechter and Sophie Melvin (this was not, notes Philip Foner in his History of the Labor Movement…, young Sophie’s first arrest connected to her union agitation). The three young women became an immediate cause celibre, their hefty bail raised by Communist charities and national speaking tours serving as strike support fundraisers. Public outcry caused local officials to drop the charges against the three young women, who continued their propaganda work in spite of the losing campaign. By September, strikers were returning to work without a union, although the Loray mill had reduced the work week to 50 hours(!). The real value of the strike was that it laid crucial groundwork for New Deal and C.I.O. organizing that was to shortly follow.

Si Gerson was a cub reporter for the Daily Worker when he was assigned to the Gastonia strike, met and fell in love with Sophie. Of course, they married and were a lovely couple. Sophie continued to be a political activist, in addition to being a mother and grandmother, but Si’s work cast a long shadow. It is a shame that while news of Si’s death reached me by notices from comrades in the Socialist Party, colleagues in the Coalition for Free and Open Elections and general e-mail listserve forwards, I had to learn about Sophie’s passing in passing conversation with a comrade, a year and a half after the fact. Sophie Gerson (nee Melvin) is truly an unsung American hero and deserves more of a monument than this little blog post.

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Ga Ga for the Last Next Big Thing

In 1976, Lester Bangs greeted the Rolling Stones minor album Black and Blue with a sense ironic relief. “They really don’t matter or stand for anything, ” he wrote, “which is certainly lucky for both them and us. I mean, it was a heavy weight to carry for all concerned. This is the first meaningless Stones album, and thank god!” Slightly less witheringly (but only just so), The Onion’s Noel Murray writes of Spoon’s latest long player, “For those who thought Spoon’s one-two punch of Girls Can Tell and Kill The Moonlight marked the group as a contender for the ‘Best American Band Of The ’00s’ label, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga may be a disappointment.

It’s not as bad as all that. But it doesn’t sound like the Next Great Statement from a band that has been making instant classics since 1999’s Series of Sneaks. But, now that I think about it, none of Spoon’s records have ever grabbed me on the first listen. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga was on its fifth spin on my HiFi while I was writing and deleting much of what was going to be this review. It’s a lot better than all that.

The usual hallmarks of a Spoon record – tense rising action punctuated by the occasional raveup, and a minimalist style that emphasizes the silence in between the musical notes – are largely missing. What we have instead is an album by a band in transition. Building upon “I Turn My Camera On,” half the songs on this record – “Don’t You Evah,” “Rhythm & Soul,” “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case” and “Finer Feelings” – ride a similar icy cold R&B groove. These songs are pure Sex – perverse, sweaty, disaffected Sex. The triumph of groove and feeling over song craft perhaps marks Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga as Spoon’s Black and Blue. Would Lester Bangs hear the end of Spoon’s trailblazing period in this disc?

Like no band that I can think of, Spoon was completely made by a single piece of rock criticism, Camden Joy’s millennial summing up of the 90’s varied Next Big Things and how they all ultimately came up short of reinventing rock and roll. Joy, of course, pinned her hopes on Spoon after Elektra dumped them and their power pop record, Series of Sneaks. Who could have predicted the left turn that was the minimalism of Girls Can Tell? Perhaps Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the beginning of a similar stylistic change, Spoon’s own “plastic soul” period. Or, perhaps, having failed to reinvent and save rock n roll, Spoon has settled down to put out good records that make the pretty girls dance and swoon.

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Portrait of a Charming Man

It’s hardly unusual to find a glowing hagiography of a corporate CEO in the pages of a major newspaper. I’m not, per se, opposed to feting J.W. Marriott. If you can get past the creepy fact that he’s a high elder of the Mormon church, he’s just a charming old man who values family, tells hokey jokes and makes a point of being personally courteous to his workers. However, when the Washington Post goes so far as to twist the words of a leader of the hotel employees union to make the CEO of one of the most viciously anti-union companies in the country sound like a good boss, well, that’s when I get mad.

The Marriott corporation runs an anti-union operation as pervasive and sophisticated as Wal-Mart’s. First-line managers are trained to call the corporation’s central union-busting office at the slightest sign of discontent. Corporate’s union busters fly in and do the usual mix of firings, captive audience and one-on-one meetings, and maybe even a slight raise in wages – all in order to keep the status quo of “on-call” employment with no job protection.

The author of the piece, Michael Rosenwald, interviewed the hotel division president of UNITE HERE, John Wilhelm, for the piece. Wilhelm presumably used the opportunity to speak at length about Marriott’s anti-union track record – such as the fact that only ten percent of its operations are unionized compared to better than 30% of Hilton and Starwoods, or the briefly-alluded-to 20 year fight to unionize San Francisco’s flagship Marriott hotel – but the author shallowly focused on the few positive things that Wilhelm could say about J.W. Marriott.

Like, for instance, his common man touch when dealing with employees on a personal basis. Okay, so the man introduces himself and engages in chit chat with the bellmen and doormen when staying at one of his hotels. Well, that’s nice…I guess. But is this only notable because most corporate suits act like total dickheads around the “hired help?” How about the doozy that in the three cities where UNITE HERE has managed to make dealing with the union a cost of doing business that Marriott “live[s] up to the terms of the contracts?” When does living up to the legally enforceable contracts you have made become laudable, or even notable? Only in the context of a company that breaks the law with impunity when resisting its workers’ rights to organize and improve the job.

The Washington Post owes readers a complete picture of Marriott’s union-busting human resources policies, or else it owes us their traditional silence on wrong-doing when praising a charming elder statesman.

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Back In the Line

At first blush, Thursday’s story in the Times Metro section that disgraced former Central Labor Labor Council President Brian McLaughlin has returned to work as a rank and file electrician has a certain poetry to it. McLaughlin is charged with stealing from the New York State legislature where he served as an Assemblyman, from his own re-election campaign, from his home local in the Electrician’s union, from the Central Labor Council and, most ignominiously, from a union sponsored little league – over two million dollars in total. The evidence is damnable.

That the dapper chief could brush off years of high living and the shame of his fall from grace, and return to work alongside the union brothers he has let down, at a job that is very physically demanding when most men his age are considering retirement is almost, well, admirable.

Damn his eyes. I can’t help but feel used all over again. Surely he returned to the trades and had the story leaked to Steven Greenhouse of the Times in an attempt to co-author the last chapter of his story before he goes down the river. I’d like to believe that McLaughlin waited his turn in the union’s hiring hall roll call like any other brother, but I ain’t making the mistake of taking his honesty for granted ever again.

Most troubling is McLaughlin’s claim that he is working because he needs the money. Even before the graft, McLaughlin collected sizable multiple incomes from the Assembly, Local 3, the CLC and other assorted bodies. The tendency of labor leaders to collect multiple salaries from their various affiliates is a well-known tactic to obscure exactly how large their salaries can get, and McLaughlin was already a bit of a joke in the movement for how baldly he sought out additional salaries. In fact, his ability to clear over a quarter million dollars a year, “ethically” (if not particularly nobly or selflessly) is partly what led me to conclude that the man was probably honest. After all, who would need more money than what he was pulling down “on the books?” And where did it all go?

I worry that Brian McLaughlin has, as they say, debts no honest man can pay and that his scandal is only just beginning.