Aye, those paper mill boys were a motley crew. They weren't bad people, just a little funny in the head. We used to speculate that it was caused by working the swing shift, and maybe that was part of it, but I think there were a couple other reasons as well. We used to joke that it was the best job on the river. The reason that was a joke was that it was pretty much the only job on the river. People worked there who wouldn't normally work in a factory because it paid better than whatever it was they were really cut out to do. We had high school drop outs and college graduates working side by side, the only thing they had in common was that they all wanted to live in the Cheboygan area. There's nothing really special about Cheboygan, but people who grow up here tend to stay here if they can. Those who have to leave to find work usually come right back when a local opportunity opens up, or when they retire, whatever happens first. Then there was the fact that most of those guys grew up and went to school together. They married each other's sisters, or didn't, and some of them were still upset about that.
I don't think that the logging business around here was ever unionized, probably because there were a lot of small operators that kept going in and out of business. Many of the loggers were only loggers in the winter and farmers in the summer. There were a few big sawmill operations too, but they must have kept their employees relatively happy, for the times they lived in. It was different in the copper mines of the Upper Peninsula, they were all big operations and were a hotbed of union activity, the old fashioned kind of union activity, head busting and all. The copper mines played out decades ago, but those Yoopers continued to vote Democrat until just recently. I think that Obama was largely responsible for their conversion. Then there were the auto plants Down Below, they got organized a little later than the copper mines, and I think there was some head busting, but not as much. Last I heard, that region was still voting Democrat.
I read a book once about Hitler, and it told of the long standing animosity between Germany and Russia. It went back at least as far as the days of the Czar, and the advent of Communism didn't dampen it down one bit. Funny that Karl Marx was a German, but the first big country to embrace Communism was Russia. You'd think that would have brought them closer together, but it didn't. Hitler had fought in World War I, and he blamed Germany's loss of that war on the Commies and Jews back home, who he believed conspired together to sell Germany down the river. He vowed that he would make them pay for that some day, and he did his best to fulfill that vow when he came into power. Hitler wasn't the only German who felt that way about the Jews and the Commies, but he was the one who ended up leading the charge against them. One thing you can say about Hitler was that he sure knew how to work up a crowd.
I don't know what to tell you about those mass movements, I'm not really a mass movement kind of guy you know. Come to think of it, some of them never really die out, they just kind simmer down. Last I heard, there were still some Anarchists around, at least on the internet.
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