There’s a book just out by Dolores Goodman Kearnes, who had that book about
Lincoln maybe ten years ago, and I first got hooked on her way before that when
she did a book on LBJ, even being invited to his ranch while he was out of power
and just sitting around waiting to die.
It’s about Theodore Roosevelt and one of the big events was the election of
1912 when he was running on the Bull Moose ticket while Taft was the Republican
and Wilson was the Democrat and Eugene Debs (who I’m still reading that book
about) was running as the socialist from inside prison walls. The thing is you
then had three progressives (precursors to the today’s liberals) and one
socialist.
Debs by the way carried no states but did get six percent of the vote which
is pretty high for a socialist. One of the reasons he didn’t carry more is
because the other guys stole his platform which was the eight hour day and other
worker’s right things, which, when enacted, made our working experiences soft
relative to those who came before us.
The radicalism of the turn of the century is mostly forgotten these days,
we 60s types were pretty unaware of it. Had we been we would have realized what
pipsqueaks we were compared to them.
Well the workingman had some power then. Probably because he had no power
to begin with and the captains of industry pushed him to desperation, and he had
nothing to do but fight back. The workingman looked great standing up to the
bosses, not so great when he looked down on minorities and wouldn’t let them be
part of the battle. And not so great maybe when he got what he wanted and then
turned his back on the struggle and said I got mine, fuck everybody else.
The lefties that had fought the fight with him were forgotten, and it was
partly their fault because they were constantly fighting between the socialists
and the communists and the unionists. Well they were fighting for abstract
things and what the workingman wanted was material things and once he got enough
of them he dropped out.
And now the union guys are fading and getting picked off. Probably they
should have continued their fight until they had unionized everybody. But there
is that other problem in that the guys running the union are not the workingman
anymore and when some moneybags guy drops by they are easily tempted.
And another thing that made things easier back in our day was employment
was pretty low. You didn’t have to worry about losing a job because there was
always another one just down the street. And for those of us who went to
college it was pretty cheap so we weren’t carrying around those horrific student
debts that you hear about.
Used to be, maybe a little before our day, that you could go to work for
some big company and spend your life there and they probably wouldn’t treat you
too badly and you could come out with a reliable pension.
Do you ever read the business section of the newspaper? Myself I scan
through it, but I am so bored I seldom pick anything up. But there is a very
pro-business slant to the articles in between the conglomeration of
conglomerates. One of the things they laud is how the New Man will not be tied
down to some boring company all his life, he will flit back and forth, going
from company to company doing this and that as his abilities allow, and the
companies will be begging for his services and he will be in the driver’s
seat.
And I think that’s all bullshit. What is really going on is the companies
are hiring him only until they can find somebody cheaper to take his job and
then shedding him like dandruff to find another job at some other company who
will hire him to work cheaper than the guy they fire to hire him.
The employee is never in the driver’s seat, and even less so in times of
high unemployment like now, and it will only get worse.
Because we are all going to hell in a handbasket. And if you didn’t hear
it from someone before now, then you heard it from here first.
And it must be true because an old guy is saying it.
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