The mill comes to Cheboygan

I don’t see how the anti-mill people were like the dogs in the manger in that they didn’t keep the rest of you from the soft hay of those fat mill paychecks. The whole thing reminds me of the industrial revolution coming to town. Before that I suppose they were the lords and ladies of the village, they had their names, their forebears, their social places. It doesn’t seem like there were a lot of jobs to hand out, and maybe it was a small pond, but they were the biggest frogs in it.

And then along came the mill and everything was turned topsy turvy. At one point in Champaign they built an atomic energy plant sixty miles down the road and it seemed like all the bums were getting construction jobs and walking around with those fat paychecks.

Maybe it looked a little like socialism to those manger dogs. They all had their own little businesses or farms or whatever that had been built up over a long time. And suddenly in comes this mill and people who had never built up anything were making big bucks at the mill. Of course it wasn’t their bucks, and it was probably a good thing for them to be living among people who were making money and spending it in their businesses, but I guess they didn’t have the stature they once had and those clerks that they had once ordered around could now just up and get a job at the mill.

There is maybe another way to look at it. Before the mill these people plied their trades, maybe took pride in doing what they did, not beholden to anything but the vagaries of the business cycle. But at the plant they were just hands for hire. They did whatever their bosses told them to do, and when the bosses told them they wanted them to do something else they did that, and anytime the bosses decided to can them they were out.

Or maybe not, you had that union. What was the deal with the union? It sounds like there wasn’t one originally. Did you guys form your own, or did some other union come in and say, how would you guys like to join?

I don’t think that America gets as much credit for making the Red Chinese (that phrase, archaic as it is, has a certain ring to it) the power that they have become, I think they did it themselves. I guess we could debate on that.