There is an array of felt dolls with charming personality on display in the lobby/shop window of the Museum of Craft and Folk Art. I do not yet know the name of the designer and wish I could provide better than what the cell phone captures. My favorite is the lantern fish.
Untitled, from the series Short Tales from the American Landscape, 2008. Pen-and-ink on Bristol paper, 9 x 12 in.
“Parade of Pain” is a term journalist Thomas Ewing Dabney, the former Financial Editor for the New Orleans States, introduces in a chapter of the book, Revolution or Jobs: The Odenheimer Plan for Guaranteed Employment (New York: The Dial Press, 1933). Three years into the Great Depression, Dabney wrote this piece of boosterism advancing a proposal of Sigmund Odenheimer to increase general employment. The numbers of unemployed were staggering. Four million were without jobs at the beginning of 1931 with that number doubling by the end of the year, representing a truer number of twenty-four million when factoring in the number of dependents (ftn. 2, pg. 27). Efforts to address the problem had been ineffectual. In 1930, with 2,429,000 unemployed, President Herbert Hoover appointed a Committee on Unemployment. The presiding Colonel Arthur Woods, former committee chairperson under President Warren G. Harding’s Conference on Unemployment from 1921-22, created a proposal for “a billion dollar highway-reforestation-public works development” (96-7). When the number of unemployed hit the ten million mark in 1931, Hoover put Walter S. Gifford, President of American Telephone & Telegraph, at the head of a newly created Unemployment Committee, who served for one winter season. Gifford favored private business expansion over any new public works projects (see quotation p. 98). Curiously, projects earmarked from the $332,000,000 voted by Congress in fall 1932 for emergency measures included: 1) $1,500,000 improvement to Chanute Field, Illinois (later Chanute Air Force Base), 2) $55,000 improvement to Charleston navy yard, and, 3) $130,000 improvement to Boston navy yard. None of these projects were deemed necessary by either the War Department or the Navy Department. According to Dabney, all construction in 1932 dropped to half of the 1931 output (100).
By the time unemployment reached 11,420,000 in February 1932, Congress created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). The first action taken by the RFC was the “shovelling [of] money into the banks, and into Big Business, to pay off the banks and bolster bonds” (100). Between February 2 and November 30, banks received $806,750,000, the greatest portion to a few large institutions — $90,000,000 was awarded to the Chicago Central Republic Bank and Trust Company (also known as City National Bank and Trust) a few days before bank board member, Charles Dawes, resigned as head of the RFC, while Amadeo Giannini’s San Francisco-based Bank of America received $64,000,000. “Half a billion” went to railroads, and smaller amounts were doled out to crop-marketing organizations and farmers for crop production. Of the $146,535,000 earmarked for construction projects, and thus, job creation, not a dollar was put into effect by the end of 1932 (for statistics, see pp. 101-3).
These large amounts of money, for their day, mean nothing without translating that legislated funding into actual benefit to the lives of ordinary people. Dabney cites the case of Louisiana, the first state in the Union to receive unemployment-relief loans. There the day’s pay was set at a maximum of $1.50, with four days the maximum number of days for the work week. Total wage could not exceed $6.00, and that was limited to one person per family, no matter the size of the family. Average employment was one and a half days a week. The Mississippi bridge at New Orleans was the first such public works project under this funding. The wage-rate on that job was 25 cents an hour, with a ceiling on hours worked at 30 per week. Thus, the maximum a worker could receive was $7.50 per week (105-6).
Odenheimer was the president of Lane Cotton Mills in New Orleans. He had been with the company for forty-six years. During Odenheimer’s studies at University of Karlsruhe, in Germany, he came under the spell of socialism, perhaps suggesting, for Dabney at least, an unusual concern for the plight of the worker on the part of an employer. He was a firm capitalist, though, during his rise in American commerce. Early in his career, Odenheimer invented a cotton bagging made of cotton fiber at a time when the “jute trust” had doubled the price of its product. By obtaining a patent and then offering the right to manufacture this product to others without royalty, he managed to defeat the jute trust. He continued to innovate and engage the cotton industry in new methods of manufacture and distribution. He was one of the few cotton manufacturers to weather the onslaught of the Great Depression. Odenheimer first proposed his idea on unemployment at an Association of Commerce luncheon in November 1932. Simply put, he sought an amendment that would authorize Congress to legislate on hours of labor. With a congressional “Hours of Labor Commission,” any employer with, say, five or more employees would not be allowed to exceed a total number of hours per week, determined by the Commission on an economically dynamic scale (137).
While distributing worker hours to those unemployed by scaling down hours held by those employed seems simple enough, Dabney chose to stay clear of “the economic riddle”: “…foreign debts, business cycles, tariffs, debtor-and-creditor nations, budgets, the farm situation, the gold standard or armaments” (17). Dabney cites the collapse of purchasing power as the cause for the crash of 1929, with too much invested in profits and new capital investment and too little in wages, or consuming power. The author uses a frequently recurring equation that results in the phrase “purchasing-consuming-producing power” (70).
While it is true of this nation’s history that workers have always had to bear the brunt of recurring cycles of national depression since 1817, the idea, inherent in Dabney’s argument, that production and consumption are factors of unlimited quantity when unharnessed, does not accord with the concurrent history of corporate profit motivation. Louis Adamic provides a set of questions of what profit motivation produces in the cycle of manufacturing and distribution in his book, Dynamite: A Century of Class Violence in America, 1830-1930 (London: Rebel Press, 1984; first published in 1931 and revised by the author in 1934). In looking at racketeering and sabotage, two elements that rose hand-in-hand with industrialization in the nineteenth century and had been professionalized at the time of his writing, Adamic asks from the workers’ point of view:
“…have not [the capitalist class] laid waste the country’s national resources with utter lack of consideration for their human values — forests, mines, land and waterways? Did they not dump cargoes of coffee and other goods into the sea, burn fields of cotton, wheat and corn, throw trainloads of potatoes to waste — all in the interest of higher incomes? Did not millers and bakers mix talcum, chalk and other cheap and harmful ingredients with flour? Did not candy manufacturers sell glucose and taffy made with vaseline, and honey made with starch and chestnut meal? Wasn’t vinegar often made of sulphuric acid? Didn’t farmers and distributors adulterate milk and butter? Were not eggs and meat stored away, suffering deterioration all the while, in order to cause prices to rise?” (205)
Adamic relates the case of the Pacific Northwest Lumber Trust and the demand for lumber in 1917. After the entry of the United States into World War I, the demand for lumber in various industries skyrocketed. In consequence, lumber companies took advantage by boosting their prices: “…some increased them from $16 to $116 per thousand feet in a few days, and before the end of 1917 were selling spruce for government airplanes at $1200 a thousand. And most of that spruce could not be used for airplanes.” By comparison, workers’ wages increased only slightly where strikes were successful in coercing employers into raising wages (168).
The corporate landscape is the same today, witness oil spills destroying natural ecosystems, fracking for natural gas polluting natural water tables, or factories and mining polluting natural waterways. The profit motive in manufacturing has not changed. When pressed or when seeking to maximize profit, corporations have simply moved operations overseas where concerns for environmental degradation and worker health and safety do not exist. I recommend viewing the film, Last Train Home (2009), directed by Lixin Fan, which documents the movement of 130 million Chinese workers during New Year to reunite with their families only several days out of the year. It is heart rending with its focus on the cumulative effects upon the individual worker and the dissolution of family. Or, come to see the screening of Dust: The Great Asbestos Trial (2011), directed by Niccolo Bruna and Andrea Prandstralle of Italy, in its San Francisco premiere on Friday, July 6th. Besides exploring the “first great criminal trial” against asbestos manufacturers, which opened in Turin in 2009 and resulted in convictions in 2012, the film offers a look at the plight of asbestos-related work in India and Brazil. For further information on this and other LaborFest events for the month of July, visit: http://www.laborfest.net. A booklet for the complete programme is also available around the city, including The Green Arcade bookstore, 1680 Market Street at Gough.
Revolution or Jobs is still a useful guide to the economic landscape of the early years of the Great Depression. Through this reading, one finds a palpable sense of the scope and detail of human misery from the time. It was a time when people believed revolution could happen. Adamic shows how the press only reported on unemployment and hunger when, starting in 1930, communists organized hunger demonstrations and parades, which often resulted in mounted police riding down upon demonstrators and clubbing them, causing much bloodshed. It was the bloodshed which made headlines. And it was those headlines that gradually forced Hoover to publicly acknowledge the seriousness of the unemployment problem.
President Bush Explains His Social Security Reform Proposal:
“WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: ‘I don’t really understand. How is it the new plan is going to fix the problem?’
PRESIDENT BUSH (Verbatim response): ‘Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table. Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There’s a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to that has been promised.
Does that make any sense to you?
It’s kind of muddled. Look, there’s a series of things that cause the –like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, supposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.’ “
Circa July 24, 2005.
Documentation from collaborative performance by David Duckworth and John Landino, Waterboarding: Last Gasp for Habeas Corpus and the Geneva Conventions, Jonathan Shorr Gallery, New York, September 30, 2006. Involved wheat pasting by gallery visitors. Top photograph: Timothy Feresten. Middle and bottom photographs: author(s) unknown.
Johnny Peres Bruno. Surprise, Surprise. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in.
This painting was the most objectionable piece to actually enter the group show American Seven at Works/San José (August 22-September 16 2006), a non-profit space in downtown San Jose. At the time, the gallery was housed in a lovely mission-style building that had been a former flour factory at 451 South First Street. Co-curators Fanny Retsek and Sandra Starkey were unsure about its inclusion. I understood reservations about this piece: it is extremely crude, both in content and technique. But it is what Bruno was all about at the time, combining a visceral assault on the senses with a passion for social justice issues. Exploring the Seven Deadly Sins through this exhibition, I found in Bruno’s work a compelling portrait of the gluttony that characterizes American life, not just in terms of personal freedom and consumption, but the implied violence that has always been a feature of life in this country.
I discovered Bruno in a short article in enparalelo, a magazine on social concerns produced in Brooklyn, New York. After seeing the painting, You say tomato…I say tomato, reproduced with the article, I knew he was right for the show. We met at his studio and I just fell in the love with the guy, his passions, his convictions, his sincerity. In an e-mail message to me during October 2005, Bruno wrote of “turning Surprise Surprise into a twenty foot gluttonous psycho pig.” That ambition, or whim, was never realized. We included Surprise, Surprise and a second painting in the show. Sometime thereafter Bruno returned to his home in Nashville and his former vocation as a stained glass artist. I was sad to see him go.
Our preamble for the show nuanced the traditional concept of the Seven Deadly Sins with the following interpretation: 1) Pride/Nationalism and Religious Fundamentalism: the social agenda of placing one religious view in a dominant position and removing all others from that view; the belief that the world must follow suit and the manipulation of the engines of war towards that purpose. 2) Envy/Image Culture: the competition for fashion; competition for possessions that confer social status; body reconstruction; celebrity glamorization and consumption of the celebrity image. 3) Anger/Social Punishment: criminalization legislation, like the Rockefeller drug laws, that overcompensate for social ills; gun culture; social intolerance aimed at specified groups (hate crimes and hateful legislation); crimes of passion. 4) Avarice/Corporate Culture: manipulation and control of the social body through market consolidation, legislative lobbying, and secret power-broking with elected officials. 5) Sloth/Television Culture: the reluctance, disinterest, or inability to seek knowledge and answers to the world’s complexity and problems; sound-byte satiation. 6) Gluttony/Consumption: the consumption of fast foods and retail goods; a culture of excess; growing disparity between the rich and the poor; a nation’s craving for want. 7) Lust/Acquisition of Wealth: money laundering, graft, fraud; game show competition; gambling.
I have decided that it is time to quit Facebook. After learning of the news that co-founder Eduardo Saverin has renounced American citizenship in order to reap maximum profit from an initial public offering of Facebook on May 17th, I considered the immense profit that he will make and what he will not give back to the supposed community he represented at one time. I do understand that Saverin sued Mark Zuckerberg over his ownership in the company and that American citizenship does represent only one part of a global network of Facebook users. In fact, community may be a meaningless term in this context. But, considering that 1,780 top earners in this country gave up their citizenship last year ahead of pending legislation that would raise taxes for those same earners, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of 2010, to be phased in starting January 1, 2013, I would rather find true community with others where excessive greed is not realized through the free content of my social networking activities (Danielle Kucera, Sanat Vallikappen and Christine Harper, “Facebook Co-Founder Saverin Gives Up U.S. Citizenship Before IPO,” Bloomberg, May 11, 2012; http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-11/facebook-co-founder-saverin-gives-up-u-s-citizenship-before-ipo.html). I did see the 2010 film The Social Network and found it disquieting. Nevertheless, I retained the Facebook account.
It is important to note that “well-educated people who actually have a great deal of affection for America,” so characterized by Richard Weisman (Kucera et al), would make the choice to leave this country rather than contribute to it, but I cannot agree with the sentiments of Cato Institute’s Daniel J. Mitchell, who places blame on the tax system. Mitchell does not believe in social responsibility, citing Saverin’s exit as “evidence of taxpayers escaping countries controlled by politicians who get too greedy” (“Facebook Co-Founder Renounces US Citizenship For Tax Reasons,” redOrbit, May 13, 2012; http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1112534043/facebook-co-founder-renounces-us-citizenship-for-tax-reasons/). Mitchell’s peers believe in a bloated Federal budget because they can funnel contract money from a bloated military budget into their coffers. Mitchell is disingenuous at best.
David Duckworth, Soup Line. Acrylic, 2012. Stencil executed by Philippe Barnoud on bridge near Paris University 8, Saint-Denis, for exhibition, Écritures en migration[s].
I made my second visit to City and County of San Francisco, Department of Human Services to apply for County Adult Assistance Programs / Personal Assisted Employment Services job placement. The bookstore owner who employs me occasionally may be able to obtain a grant, in which case he can hire a part time employee who is registered with this City and County of San Francisco program.
Although my second appointment was not scheduled until Monday, the 14th of May, I appeared early this morning in the hope that I could be seen sooner. I am scheduled to work one day only on Monday, the request to work coming only two days ago. The doors open at 7:30 a.m. For my purpose today, I am considered “back fill,” which resonates with sludge, sewage back-up, stagnant fluid, and a host of other terms. If that suggests a condition in which bacteria or other organisms can lead to a festering predicament, the behavior of individuals at the lines inside the office fulfilled the imagination amply. One gentleman ahead of me was greeted by an acquaintance who arrived behind all of us. They switched places so that the first gentleman could retrieve a City and County form. His return to the line was noticed by a security officer, who questioned his entering the line ahead of others. Needless to say, an argument erupted. In another instance, a woman who claimed to have been misdirected to one line, attempted to enter our line at the very front. She was prevented from doing so by another security officer, but not without becoming loud and nasty. She ended up behind me, where I listened to her tell someone, Wait until I catch that bitch outside and beat the shit out of her, with her geri curl head and Tammy Faye make-up.
These are not the meek supplicating for a bowl of soup. I have been at this office enough times in the past to have formed the opinion that quite the opposite is true for a good number of program applicants, whether it is job-related or food-related (Food Stamps or EBT). But we would all prefer anything else to this bureaucratic pavane.
“The idea of a productive protest is happening and I believe it is the start of a new paradigm in collective action. The urban gardening and guerrilla gardening movements are some more obvious examples of this new trend. It seems difficult for many to see the political nature of gardening, but for the people involved in these approaches, it is a gesture to raise awareness of what a piece of industrial waste ground should be. Choosing to plant life and feed people in a neglected area is a way of publicly and productively making an opinion heard in an attempt to influence public opinion or government policy. It is also a community attempting to directly enact desired change themselves. This is protest.” — Robyn Waxman, “Rethinking Protest: A Designer’s Role in the Next Generation of Collective Action,” FARM, 2011, page 30
On April 13th, a young woman held up a copy of this publication from The Future Action Reclamation Mob (F.A.R.M.) during an evening of song and spoken word at the reception for The Green Arcade bookstore’s art exhibition, A Night of Surreal Superstition. She explained to the audience the project’s overall aims bringing together students of California College of the Arts San Francisco and the homeless of the vicinity. Her call was an invitation for others to join in this act of revolution. Not only does the farm aim to produce crops for anyone in need of food, but it does so by participating outside of a capitalist system of commodity and exchange. Thus, gifting becomes the exchange medium wherein the individuals of the community involved carry equal status.
Certainly during earlier depressions, in an unending recurrence of depressions which constitute the life of capitalism, jobless and starving American citizens have sought the means to produce and consume outside the capitalist system. The Hoovervilles of 1931, so-called because of President Herbert Hoover’s continued denials that an economic depression would last, involved people who had become homeless building structures from discarded materials. The aggregate structures were shanty towns where homes tended to be built in rows and the pathways between took on the form of streets with given names. The inhabitants were people who had become jobless. A large self-help movement developed in California where, at various times, 500,000 families were affiliated. By the end of 1932, thirty-seven states followed the example set by California. In Seattle during the summer months of 1931, an organization called the Unemployed Citizens League (UCL) began organizing a self-help movement that centered around mutual aid. Its membership rose to 80,000 in 1933 as it spread through the state of Washington. The UCL negotiated with the fishermen’s union to lend boats for fishing. Farmers were persuaded to allow UCL members to harvest fruit and potatoes that would not go to market, borrowing trucks to transport the food. Bartering became widespread and highly organized. By the winter of 1931, it was apparent that mutual aid would not be enough for the needs of the jobless (Franklin Folsom, Impatient Armies of the Poor: The Story of Collective Action of the Unemployed, 1808-1942, pages 277-81).
Whether or not today’s economic crisis has initiated current experiments in collective action based on alternative economies, the fact that a growing number of people seek non-capitalist solutions for the exchange of goods and services is notable. Bay Area Community Exchange (BACE) (http://timebank.sfbace.org/) offers a system of time exchange in which one member may “buy” an hour’s time from another member, receiving a particular service, giving the service provider an hour that can be used elsewhere. This system values everyone’s hours equally, eliminates the use of paper and coin currency, and builds relationships between participating members. “…This is a system for people who are undervalued in [the] traditional marketplace,” according to co-founder Mira Luna. One off-shoot of the BACE model is the effort by People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights (PODER) SF to serve residents of the Mission and the Excelsior with a similar program. Where BACE has perfected digital and Web-based mechanisms to enhance operation, PODER prefers community gatherings where people meet face-to-face (see Yael Chanoff, “Bank Your Time,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 2-8, 2012, page 9).
Around the time I read Novella Carpenter’s Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (2009), a humorous and endearing narrative of a guerrilla farmer cropping on a vacant lot in an economically depressed neighborhood of Oakland (Carpenter maintains a blog at http://ghosttownfarm.wordpress.com/), I became involved as a volunteer at Hayes Valley Farm. Located on 2 1/4 acres where a set of freeway ramps once absorbed toxic waste from heavy traffic, the Farm was begun by a group of visionary permaculture enthusiasts who contracted from the City of San Francisco at no cost for 3 1/2 years. I could no longer afford the cost of courses at City College of San Francisco’s Environmental Horticulture department, an excellent Associate of Arts degree program where graduates are guaranteed employment in the field. Volunteering at the Farm, the roof garden of California Academy of Sciences (a native flora laboratory), and Bay Native Nursery, run by Geoffrey Coffey and Paul Furman, provided an excellent alternative education. Hayes Valley Farm operates upon the principle of regenerative farming. In this case, soil is built rather than shipped in; urban gardeners do not consider the fact that when they buy soil they are robbing another environment of its most precious commodity. We started with recycled cardboard. Upon that we dumped and mixed donated waste chipping from regional horticultural activity and donated horse manure from a San Francisco stable. The next stage involved planting the nitrogen-fixing plants fava bean and clover. Once the fava bean was harvested and its stems and leaves returned to the ground, other crops were planted. Marigold was used as a natural pest repellant.
Life has not been as kind as I would like it to be, so I could not continue indefinitely with the Farm because of a changing employment situation. But the time I did spend there was invaluable. Anyone was welcome to join in the creation of the farm. The food that was harvested was shared amongst volunteers and given to people in need. Since that first year the Farm has built a greenhouse, compost pits, sheds, a stone and cob community meeting area, and conducted classes on permaculture and bee keeping in a straw bale seating area (http://www.hayesvalleyfarm.com/).
The land will revert to the city. The city will then turn it over to commercial development. There is sadness in endings, especially in a case like this, where an idyllic but achievable dream will be replaced by housing units for the more affluent. I was speaking to an acquaintance named Kevin about the Farm recently. Committed to the redistribution of wealth, his imagination of late has been fueled by theoretical acts of taking. He condemned the organizers of the Farm for not resisting the impending commercial take over. He also dismissed these same individuals for being from a social strata of the privileged (he had concluded this after working for one month only at the Farm). We had a heated discussion about it; I could not agree and we are both passionate debaters. I happened to tell Todd, a work colleague at a temporary job site, about the argument. Todd is the conservative type. He loves statements like, Name a Communist country that hasn’t failed! (His father served as a public relations man, not a soldier, in Vietnam during the late 60s, so I can guess his indoctrination to authoritarian views began early in life.*) Todd was impressed that I had a “conservative” side myself. But I corrected him to an extent stating my belief that any conservatively minded person would simply laugh at a project like Hayes Valley Farm, where everyone is on equal footing and the fruits of this collective labor is equally shared. After all, the conservatives of this country love the capitalist system for its sheer competitiveness and some-people-will-win-over-most-others rewards.
The Hooper Street garden siding California College of the Arts was also begun in 2009. Like Hayes Valley Farm, the ground was toxic, in this case from what was once a Greyhound facility. Waxman’s husband terms the project a “Slow Protest” (“Rethinking Protest,” 34) because FARM is remediating an environment that took decades to form. Waxman set out to determine how the youngest generation, the so-called Millennial Generation, would respond to such a project as a form of protest; she observes the California College of Arts participants’ background as part of “a generation who has lived a fairly comfortable life…young, educated, upper/middle-class students, who perceive no obvious change in their civil rights” (ibid). Looking at generational use of forms of protest is one of the more interesting aspects of Waxman’s essay. Like Mark Bauerlein, whom Waxman quotes — “…we’re about to turn our country over to a generation that doesn’t read much and doesn’t think much either” (“Rethinking Protest,” 12) — I have not put faith in this newest generation’s ability to challenge the world, because of my perception that they are additionally apathetic and self-absorbed with the consumption of social media and gadgetry. Waxman finds positive attributes: a preference for group-oriented activities, participation as opposed to spectatorship, and a desire for experience as authentic. Waxman believes that Millennials “could be strong participants in collective political action and social movements” (13).
It is the form of protest that must be addressed in terms of effectiveness. With the Hooper Street project in focus: “[g]rowing a farm is a prolonged engagement through time, not a one-hour vigil at the trolly car turn-around on Market Street. While both activities merit credit, building a farm is arguably more sustainable, more productive, and more engaging” (“Rethinking Protest,” 35). Folsom cites historian Clark Kerr’s finding of California’s self-help organizations or “productive enterprises” in 1932 (Folsom, 278). And I do believe it will be the necessary enterprise of collective hard work and example that will lead us to a desired state of justice for the environment and the social world. Capitalism is a dead-end in terms of the betterment of this world.
* Because I did not want to open discourse on nation states and political ideologies while at the job site, I did not engage Todd in clarifying how communist states had all failed. But the implication is that anywhere communism is attempted it does fail. Perhaps he meant that today’s communist states have integrated some form of capitalism into their structure. If that were true, then I would have to say the reverse is equally true: all capitalist states have failed. After all, our own country has integrated progressive forms of socialism in order to ensure health and well-being for some of its inhabitants. And corporations are unable to profit, as obscene as those profits may be, without forms of governmental assistance and subsidy. A pure state of economics exists only on paper. The relationship between corporations and government over citizens and their government are as true today as they were at the opening of the Great Depression. Observations about Hoover’s expulsion of the Bonus Marchers from Washington, D.C. in 1932 still resonate with meaning. The approximately 20,000 World War I veterans had marched on the Capitol to demand payment for a promised and Congressionally legislated supplement to their $1-per-day service during the Great War. Congressman C. Wright Patman reminisced about the expulsion to Studs Terkel: “Who were the so-called bonus marchers? They were lobbyists for a cause. Just like the ones in the Mayflower Hotel. They didn’t try to evict them (italics in place). Why the poor come to town, and they’re put in jail for stepping on the grass. The Mayflower crowd, they don’t have any problem at all. They’re on every floor of every building of the Capitol Hill all the time.” Heywood Broun also wrote of the expulsion, contrasting the reception of business lobbyists and their success in garnering massive aid to banks and businesses by Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the use of tear gas against the veterans: “For the banks of America Mr. Hoover has prescribed oxygen. For the unemployed, chlorine.” (Both quotations appear in Folsom, page 321.)
F.S. Rosa and David Duckworth at Red Hill Books, San Francisco, April 18, 2012. Photograph by Renshin Bunce.
It was an honor to share an evening with F.S. Rosa. We presented on various aspects of labor history, Rosa reading from Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Big Bill” Haywood, and her own book, The Divine Comedy of Carlo Tresca, in a talk about the textile workers’ strike, known today as Bread and Roses, in Lawrence, Massachusetts of 1912. Tresca was an Industrial Workers of the World labor organizer at the time of the strike. I read from two posts here at the blog on labor history and the occupation of space. Our audience was attentive and contributed greatly to the overall discussion, the best possible result for such an event. I was not allowed, though, to occupy the bunny chair, normally reserved for small readers.
F.S. Rosa’s reading material at Red Hill Books. Photograph by Renshin Bunce.
dpduckworth 