Domestic Left #49: A broken heart’s your ticket

I’ve been listening recently to two new podcasts about the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the federation of industrial unions that was founded in 1935, broke with the more conservative craft unions of the American Federation of Labor in 1938, and then merged with the AFL in 1955 to create the AFL-CIO. In those twenty years, really in the first 10–12 of them, the CIO successfully organized, for the first time, most of the big mass production industries in the United States.

Even if you’re not someone with much interest in the labor movement, you’ve probably heard of the United Auto Workers and the Mineworkers and the Steelworkers — they were all CIO unions. If you’re on the left, you might have heard about the radical traditions of my own union, UE, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union on the West Coast, or about the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, the Farm Equipment Workers, and the Food, Tobacco and Allied Workers, who brought their brand of militant interracial unionism to the South and Southwest decades before the civil rights movement of the 1950s.

In the 1930s CIO unions won storied victories like the Flint sit-down strike in 1936-37 and suffered grievous defeats like the Little Steel Strike of 1937. The latter saw the last major incident of mass police murder of striking workers in the U.S., the Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago, when cops opened fire on unarmed demonstrators, wounding 40 and killing 10 of them; another 100 workers and supporters were beaten with clubs.

During World War II, the desperate need of the federal government for social harmony, and of the corporations making massive profits from wartime contracts for workers, helped the CIO finish the job of organizing basic industry, at least in the North. And then the massive postwar strikes in 1945-46, in auto, steel, electrical manufacturing, and a host of other industries, established for the first time a “middle class” standard of living for industrial workers. The settlements reached in 1946 and subsequent years by unions like the UAW and the Steelworkers brought an unprecedented level of prosperity and security to large swaths of the U.S. working class, and the unionization rate in the U.S. to its highest point. Jack Metzgar, who grew up in a steelworker household in Western Pennsylvania, wrote in his memoir, “If what we lived through in the 1950s was not liberation, then liberation never happens in real human lives.”

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I once had a friend who was a TERF (“Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist”); she passed away a little over two years ago. I got to know her over the course of several years in the early 2000s, well before her attitudes towards trans people became public and pronounced. And perhaps “friend” is a bit strong — we never spent time together outside of what was essentially work, and we only worked together a few times a year, as “inspectors of elections” (a minor elected position in Burlington, Vermont — essentially, poll workers).

Unlike many people to whom the term TERF is applied, who are just conventional liberal feminists who don't like trans people, Peggy was actually a radical feminist, with a deep and abiding belief that men play a mostly harmful role in society, and that women need to separate themselves from men. During the hours that we sat together at a long folding table in an elementary school cafeteria/gym, waiting for voters to come in and vote, say, for or against the re-election of George W. Bush (over 90 percent against, in our ward), she would share her thoughts about how working-class men are seduced into voting against their economic interests by the performative masculinity of militarism and their desire to be tough, or at least tough by proxy.

Sometimes she would also share tales of feminist organizing in the 1970s in Burlington. At one point she and her comrades got ahold of the mayor’s letterhead (something harder to counterfeit in the days before Photoshop) and used it to post around town a mayoral order decreeing a curfew for men, and men only, in order to curb rape. It apparently generated hundreds of aggrieved calls to the mayor’s office and police department, presumably from precisely the same kind of men who are always complaining that feminists have no sense of humor.

A woman who knew her from those days, who became a leader in a UE shop in the 2000s, told me that Peggy was the “bull dyke” you always wanted to have on your side in a bar fight; when straight people threatened violence to police their spaces, Peggy would fight back.

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One of the things that has really stood out to me, listening to these podcasts, is the sheer audacity of John L. Lewis, the president of the Mineworkers who, to all intends and purposes, founded the CIO, and served as its president until 1940.

Lewis was a great orator, and recordings of his speeches, not surprisingly, make for good podcast soundbites. His spoke slowly and deliberately, but with a sense of inevitable forward motion, like the rolling of the Monongahela River which brought coal, and later union organization, from the mines of West Virginia and the Allegheny Plateau to the steel mills of Pittsburgh. His language was the language of Shakespeare and the Bible. He once posed to a reporter the question of whether he was a power-hungry autocrat or a saint — and declined to answer either way.

Lewis was not a leftist, but in the early 1930s he recognized that a new, militant mood was emerging among American workers. During a Teamster strike in Minneapolis in 1934, when police and vigilantes attempted to break the strike by beating and shooting strikers, workers fought back, killing two vigilantes who had been deputized as “special police.”

Raymond Simboli, Pinkerton Riot, Pittsburgh, 1948.

Hearing Lewis’s proclamations in the context of the history they were made in, you have to respect his bravado not only in claiming to speak for the 30 million workers in American industry on the basis of the (at the time) mere million members of the CIO, but also in confidently predicting victories that, in the view of most modern historians, could have been easily derailed by any of a number of contingencies.

But perhaps Lewis was hearing the rumble of an approaching train, running on rails not of bravado and strength but of agony and travail, weeping widows and orphaned children.

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In July of 2018, the YouTuber Abigail Thorn released a video called “Why the Left Will Win.” Drawing on the work of philosopher Stacy Clifford Simplican, Thorn describes two distinct types of communities: communities of strength and communities of vulnerability, and argues that the Left will win because “vulnerability is the beginning of true solidarity.” A community of vulnerability, by accepting everyone, ultimately has far more to offer to more people than communities of strength, which only accept the strong, however that is defined (the white, the male, the able-bodied, the “real women,” etc.).

“Even a trade union,” Thorn says, “which is arguably a kind of community of strength, begins with the workers realizing that they have shared vulnerabilities that their bosses don’t have, and working together to support each other through that.”

This YouTube thumbnail is a picture of Jeremy Corbyn, which is a bit mysterious, as Corbyn is nowhere mentioned in the video. If you watch the video, note that Thorn came out as a trans woman in 2021, but has opted to leave her pre-transition videos — such as this one — up on YouTube.

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The novel Anna Karenina famously begins, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This line has given rise to the concept of the Anna Karenina principle, which holds that in difficult endeavors there are many ways to fail, but only one way to succeed. (Needless to say, most historians are not fans of this concept.)

Like Tolstoy’s happy families, all militant speeches and manifestos are alike. I should know — I have written a lot of them. They invoke the unjust suffering, the moral righteousness, and the ultimate victory of the aggrieved class on whose behalf they are made. Because we are stronger together, or something like that.

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Ezra Furman’s 2022 album All Of Us Flames opens with a song called “Train Comes Through.” It starts almost inaudibly, with an electronic rattling reminiscent of U2’s “Mothers of the Disappeared,” and takes almost its entire duration to crescendo to full album volume. It references Woody Guthrie and Leonard Cohen both lyrically and structurally; instead of the verse-chorus structure common to pop and rock music it consists of seven quatrain verses, each of which ends with the refrain “when the train comes through.”

It is also, hands down, the best labor song this century has yet produced. It’s not a labor song in the narrow sense of glorifying union struggles, but it is shot through with the larger themes of the best labor songs: toil, domination and hierarchy, and hope of eventual transfiguration.

The song opens on “a quiet night on Main Street where the poisoned water runs.” Furman sings in the first-person plural: “we may only be subordinates”; “we labored, and we built your dwellings here on the hillside”; “the histories will name us as the people underneath.” And she ominously warns the ruling class, “a great machine can break down suddenly if someone removes a tiny screw.”

The “the violent sheet of silence will be shattered,” the “brutal static order” will be brought down by absence and emptiness, transformed into power:

The emptiness you'd only heard about was one we intimately knew
But an emptiness is turned into a tunnel when a train comes through

In the final verse, Furman borrows a line from the gospel song “This Train,” from which Woody Guthrie took the title of his 1943 autobiography, Bound for Glory, but turns it inside out. While the gospel train bound for glory “don’t carry no gamblers, no hypocrites, no midnight ramblers,” Furman’s train carries us all:

This train will carry gamblers, it'll carry us midnight ramblers too
And a broken heart's your ticket so be ready when the train comes through

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The two podcasts I have been listening to are Organize the Unorganized, produced by the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University and Jacobin magazine, and Fragile Juggernaut, produced by a group of journalists, organizers and historians and sponsored by Haymarket Books. The former tells the story in thematically-organized episodes, about 40-50 minutes each. It is produced in a brisk, newsroom style, telling the story through clips of interviews with historians and audio from the period. The latter is more conversational, and takes a longer and deeper historical view — the three episodes produced so far, which are each around 90 minutes long, explore the history of the American working class before the CIO, and only get to the late 1920s.

Organize the Unorganized can be streamed on Soundcloud, or found by searching your favorite podcast app for “Jacobin Radio,” then looking for episodes titled “Organize the Unorganized.” The most recent episode covers the UE and ILWU, along with organizing efforts among packinghouse and textile workers. Fragile Juggernaut can be found under its own name on most podcast apps.